Active Harmony: Towards Automated Performance Tuning
Cristian Tapus, I-Hsin Chung, and Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth
SC'01 November 2002.
In this paper, we present the Active Harmony automated runtime tuning
system. We describe the interface used by programs to make
applications tunable. We present the Library Specification Layer which
helps program library developers expose multiple variations of the same
API using different algorithms. The Library Specification Language
helps to select the most appropriate program library to tune the
overall performance. We also present the optimization algorithm used to
adjust parameters in the application and the libraries. Finally, we
present results that show how the system is able to tune several real
applications. The automated tuning system is able to tune the
application parameters to within a few percent of the best value after
evaluating only 11 out of over 1,700 possible configurations.