HPCN Europe 2000 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Networking
Active harmony: towards automated performance tuning
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Software engineering for multicore systems: an experience report
Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Multicore software engineering
A language for the compact representation of multiple program versions
LCPC'05 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing
A language-based tuning mechanism for task and pipeline parallelism
Euro-Par'10 Proceedings of the 16th international Euro-Par conference on Parallel processing: Part II
Probabilistic auto-tuning for architectures with complex constraints
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Self-Tuning Computing Systems for the Exaflop Era
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Auto-tuners automate the performance tuning of parallel applications. Three major drawbacks of current approaches are 1) they mainly focus on numerical software; 2) they typically do not attempt to reduce the large search space before search algorithms are applied; 3) the means to provide an auto-tuner with additional information to improve tuning are limited. Our paper tackles these problems in a novel way by focusing on the interaction between an auto-tuner and a parallel application. In particular, we introduce Atune-IL, an instrumentation language that uses new types of code annotations to mark tuning parameters, blocks, permutation regions, and measuring points. Atune-IL allows a more accurate extraction of meta-information to help an auto-tuner prune the search space before employing search algorithms. In addition, Atune-IL's concepts target parallel applications in general, not just numerical programs. Atune-IL has been successfully evaluated in several case studies with parallel applications differing in size, programming language, and application domain; one case study employed a large commercial application with nested parallelism. On average, Atune-IL reduced search spaces by 78%. In two corner cases, 99% of the search space could be pruned.