AMD Forces a LibreOffice Speed Boost With GPU Acceleration

New submitter samtuke writes: AMD processors get rated and reviewed based on performance. It is in our self-interest to make things work really, really fast on AMD hardware. AMD engineers contribute to LibreOffice, for good reason. Think about what happens behind a spreadsheet calculation. There can be a huge amount of math. Writing software to take advantage of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for general purpose computing is non-trivial. We know how to do it. AMD engineers wrote OpenCL kernels, and contributed them to the open source code base. Turning on the OpenCL option to enable GPU Compute resulted in a 500X+ speedup, about ¼ second vs. 2minutes, 21 seconds. Those measurements specifically come from the ground-water use sample from this set of Libre Office spreadsheets.

Comments

Not the right tool

[Cigaes]

I wonder if a spreadsheet is really the right tool for computations that take several dozens of seconds on modern hardware, even without GPU acceleration. I am inclined to think it is not.

Re:Not the right tool

[gordo3000]

really depends on use case. Our spreadsheets (finance, derivatives) can get damn big, but there are 3 reasons they persist: ease of modification, speed of the interface, and easy integration with powerful analytics libraries we use.

Now I have functioned in a python based environment before, and that had some huge benefits (especially when working on tick level data, or data that was just a pain to manage in VBA until I got output down to a reasonably visualizable size) , and I regularly push for trade level data and details to be put off into a SQL database as it is pretty easy to write flexible queries to get what I want out. But visualizing data, interacting with historic data (user forms for display), generally integrating with many other financial libraries (bloomberg and reuters for realtime, internal quant libraries for complex calculations), and having a fast interface out of the box is amazing.

I've been at places that have tried to replace excel as the interaction layer. The problem is, for all its problems, most coders cannot hack together, on their own, a better GUI that is as performant or easily interacted with. Sometimes it isn't the data analysis layer (which if at all possible, we like to farm off somewhere else for perofrmance), but everything else that makes the spreadsheet far superior. And of course, I can modify and adapt someone else's work far faster than anyone using code. On a regular basis I can build up a complete tool in excel 10-20x faster than any coder can write me something outside of it. And most of the time a 95% correct answer in 1 hour is far more useful than a 100% correct answer in 3 days.

Now saying that, once the office ribbon started, that was the beginning of the end. Slowly the interface is getting too clunky to waste my time with when it was the simplest things I required. Now I try to do a lot of my work in a proper coding language and write out files I can parse quickly in vba and display in excel.

Re:Not the right tool

[kevmeister]

It's really amazing what you can do in a spreadsheet.

Several years ago I was involved with management of optical wavelength switching gear (DWDM) in conjunction with a large, national telcom. They had some very well designed tools with very nice GUIs to allow things like building an optical path. Things that require managing complex database and doing a lot of checking on availability of resources and validity of the circuit.

It was all written in Excel!

I was amazed at it all. Nothing looked at all like a spreadsheet. and it actually worked and seemed pretty maintainable. I'm sure that they would have been delighted to see this sort of things as the one issue was the time it took to update the screen when certain changes were made (re-calculation).

Re:Spreadsheets

[Immerman]

I like to play with orbital mechanics - "hard science fiction" scenarios such as orbital catapults and the like, and spreadsheets are a decent way to quickly run the numbers for a large range of parameters. For example, a few hundred mile tumbling-cable space elevator around the moon could grab payloads directly off the surface and launch them on Hoffman transfer orbits to Mars or Venus, without ever exceeding a fraction of a g acceleration.

Re:Spreadsheets

[alvinrod]

You can use them for about anything where you need to keep track of some data and a database is overkill. Back in the day, I had a teacher using spreadsheet software for a grade book that could automatically sum the scores and apply a curve instead of having to do it all by hand. My brother would keep track of online auction data in a spreadsheet. I've seen a few people use them to make a quick and easy chore list for their kids. They're also useful for kids who want to make some simple graphs or charts for a school report. There are probably dozens of other ways that people use them on a regular basis that I might never imagine myself.

What's going on with Base?

[XB-70]

I love LibreOffice and use it all the time... with one caveat: there appears to be little or no development going on with Base.

I may be completely wrong but no features have been added in ages, no code updates etc. etc.

Does anyone know what's going on?

Also, would Base benefit from this GPU enhancement?

Re: What about the rest of it? And Firefox?

[chipschap]

You make a good and valid point, but the people who are buying Apple for comfort will buy a new one every few years because that maintains their comfort level.

I learned, with my visit to the Apple store, that buying Apple for most people is not about

1) Being able to tweak and customize (in general; yes, you can do that if you know how)
2) Worrying about cost[1]

It is much more about

1) Comfort and assurance
2) Style
3) Relative ease of use, and lots of hand-holding.

As technical people we tend to forget how hard things can be for non-technical people. (And no, this is not because we're in any way "better" than they are, we just are good at different things.)

[1] It's true that many Apple buyers have plenty of cash. But I'm active in the local writers' community and it's amazing how many really poor writers (poverty is chronic for most writers) will scrape together every last cent to buy a Macbook.