5,602 research outputs found
A general guide to applying machine learning to computer architecture
The resurgence of machine learning since the late 1990s has been enabled by significant advances in computing performance and the growth of big data. The ability of these algorithms to detect complex patterns in data which are extremely difficult to achieve manually, helps to produce effective predictive models. Whilst computer architects have been accelerating the performance of machine learning algorithms with GPUs and custom hardware, there have been few implementations leveraging these algorithms to improve the computer system performance. The work that has been conducted, however, has produced considerably promising results.
The purpose of this paper is to serve as a foundational base and guide to future computer
architecture research seeking to make use of machine learning models for improving system efficiency.
We describe a method that highlights when, why, and how to utilize machine learning
models for improving system performance and provide a relevant example showcasing the effectiveness of applying machine learning in computer architecture. We describe a process of data
generation every execution quantum and parameter engineering. This is followed by a survey of a
set of popular machine learning models. We discuss their strengths and weaknesses and provide
an evaluation of implementations for the purpose of creating a workload performance predictor
for different core types in an x86 processor. The predictions can then be exploited by a scheduler
for heterogeneous processors to improve the system throughput. The algorithms of focus are
stochastic gradient descent based linear regression, decision trees, random forests, artificial neural
networks, and k-nearest neighbors.This work has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant RoMoL (Grant Agreemnt 321253) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN 2015-65316P).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Compiler-assisted Adaptive Program Scheduling in big.LITTLE Systems
Energy-aware architectures provide applications with a mix of low (LITTLE)
and high (big) frequency cores. Choosing the best hardware configuration for a
program running on such an architecture is difficult, because program parts
benefit differently from the same hardware configuration. State-of-the-art
techniques to solve this problem adapt the program's execution to dynamic
characteristics of the runtime environment, such as energy consumption and
throughput. We claim that these purely dynamic techniques can be improved if
they are aware of the program's syntactic structure. To support this claim, we
show how to use the compiler to partition source code into program phases:
regions whose syntactic characteristics lead to similar runtime behavior. We
use reinforcement learning to map pairs formed by a program phase and a
hardware state to the configuration that best fit this setup. To demonstrate
the effectiveness of our ideas, we have implemented the Astro system. Astro
uses Q-learning to associate syntactic features of programs with hardware
configurations. As a proof of concept, we provide evidence that Astro
outperforms GTS, the ARM-based Linux scheduler tailored for heterogeneous
architectures, on the parallel benchmarks from Rodinia and Parsec
A hyper-heuristic for adaptive scheduling in computational grids
In this paper we present the design and implementation of an hyper-heuristic for efficiently scheduling independent jobs in computational grids. An efficient scheduling of jobs to grid resources depends on many parameters, among others, the characteristics of the resources and jobs (such as computing capacity, consistency of computing, workload, etc.). Moreover, these characteristics change over time due to the dynamic nature of grid environment, therefore the planning of jobs to resources should be adaptively done. Existing ad hoc scheduling methods (batch and immediate mode) have shown their efficacy for certain types of resource and job characteristics. However, as stand alone methods, they are not able to produce the best planning of jobs to resources for different types of Grid resources and job characteristics. In this work we have designed and implemented a hyper-heuristic that uses a set of ad hoc (immediate and batch mode) scheduling methods to provide the scheduling of jobs to Grid resources according to the Grid and job characteristics. The hyper-heuristic is a high level algorithm, which examines the state and characteristics of the Grid system (jobs and resources), and selects and applies the ad hoc method that yields the best planning of jobs. The resulting hyper-heuristic based scheduler can be thus used to develop network-aware applications that need efficient planning of jobs to resources. The hyper-heuristic has been tested and evaluated in a dynamic setting through a prototype of a Grid simulator. The experimental evaluation showed the usefulness of the hyper-heuristic for planning of jobs to resources as compared to planning without knowledge of the resource and job characteristics.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
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