Application Adaptation at Runtime through Dynamic Knobs Autotuning

Abstract. Several classes of applications expose a set of parameters that influence their extra-functional properties, such as the quality of the result or the size of the output. This leads the application designer to tune these parameters in order to find the configuration that produces the desired outcome. From the architectural point of view, the trend in modern systems is to expose an high level of parallelism, often involving heterogeneous resources. To exploit the full potential of the hardware, the application designer must take into account resource-related parameters in the tuning process as well. Since the requirements of the applications and the resources assigned to each application might change at runtime, we argue that finding a one-fit-all configuration is not a trivial operation. For this reason we use a framework that enhances an application with an adaptation layer in order to continuously tune the parameters of the application according to the evolving situation, in a best effort fashion