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Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_summation_algorithm by any chance?

If this is the case - we can easily implement this algorithm.



There are several accurate summation algorithms; Kahan is one of them. Looks like Postgresql uses an accurate summation method[0] (and not Kahan), so that's probably a big factor in why theirs is so much slower and also makes for an unfair comparison. FWIW I posted AVX2 and AVX512 Kahan summation implementations here[1].

[0] https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/3ed2005ff595d34927...

[1] http://blog.zachbjornson.com/2019/08/11/fast-float-summation...


Thank you Zach, this is super interesting and useful! I wonder why PG do not use Kahan?




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