Atune-IL: An Instrumentation Language for Auto-tuning Parallel Applications

Automatic performance tuning (auto-tuning) has been used in parallel numerical applications for adapting performance-relevant parameters. We extend auto-tuning to general-purpose parallel applications on multicores. This paper concentrates on Atune-IL, an instrumentation language for specifying a wide range of tunable parameters for a generic auto-tuner. Tunable parameters include the number of threads and other size parameters, but also choice of algorithms, numbers of pipeline stages, etc. A case study of Atune-IL’s usage in a real-world application with 13 parameters and over 24 million possible value combinations is discussed. With Atune-IL, the search space was reduced to 1,600 combinations, and the lines of code needed for instrumentation were reduced from more than 700 to 25.