Active Harmony: Towards Automated Performance Tuning

TLDR

This paper introduces Active Harmony, an automated runtime tuning system. Active Harmony exposes tunable APIs through a Library Specification Layer, provides a program interface for tuning, and employs an optimization algorithm to adjust application and library parameters. Experiments demonstrate that Active Harmony can tune real applications to within a few percent of optimal performance after evaluating only 11 of over 1,700 configurations.

Abstract

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 parameers to within a few percent of the best value after evaluating only 11 out of over 1,700 possible configurations.