Active Harmony: Towards Automated Performance Tuning

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 that we 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 configurations out of over 1,700 possible combinations. Also UMIACS-TR-2002-5