Section: Software and Platforms

cTuning: Repository and Tools for Collective Characterization and Optimization of Computing Systems

Participant : Grigori Fursin [correspondant] .

Designing, porting and optimizing applications for rapidly evolving computing systems is often complex, ad-hoc, repetitive, costly and error prone process due to an enormous number of available design and optimization choices combined with the complex interactions between all components. We attempt to solve this fundamental problem based on collective participation of users combined with empirical tuning and machine learning.

We developed cTuning framework that allows to continuously collect various knowledge about application characterization and optimization in the public repository at cTuning.org. With continuously increasing and systematized knowledge about behavior of computer systems, users should be able to obtain scientifically motivated advices about anomalies in the behavior of their applications and possible solutions to effectively balance performance and power consumption or other important characteristics.

Currently, we use cTuning repository to analyze and learn profitable optimizations for various programs, datasets and architectures using machine learning enabled compiler (MILEPOST GCC). Using collected knowledge, we can quickly suggest better optimizations for a previously unseen programs based on their semantic or dynamic features [8] .

We believe that such approach will be vital for developing efficient Exascale computing systems. We are currently developing the new extensible cTuning2 framework for automatic performance and power tuning of HPC applications.

For more information, see the web page http://cTuning.org .