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Comment by Tunabrain

GPUs are deterministic machines, even for floating point.

The behavior in the linked article has to do with the use of atomic adds to reduce sums in parallel. Floating point addition is not associative, so the order in which addition occurs matters. When using atomic adds this way, you get slightly different results depending on the order in which threads arrive at the atomic add call. It's a simple race condition, although one which is usually deemed acceptable.

parent Tunabrain 3 years ago

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