A Survey on Compiler Autotuning using Machine Learning

Since the mid-1990s, researchers have been trying to use machine-learning based approaches to solve a number of different compiler optimization problems. These techniques primarily enhance the quality of the obtained results and, more importantly, make it feasible to tackle two main compiler optimization problems: optimization selection (choosing which optimizations to apply) and phase-ordering (choosing the order of applying optimizations). The compiler optimization space continues to grow due to the advancement of applications, increasing number of compiler optimizations, and new target architectures. Generic optimization passes in compilers cannot fully leverage newly introduced optimizations and, therefore, cannot keep up with the pace of increasing options. This survey summarizes and classifies the recent advances in using machine learning for the compiler optimization field, particularly on the two major problems of (1) selecting the best optimizations and (2) the phase-ordering of optimizations. The survey highlights the approaches taken so far, the obtained results, the fine-grain classification among different approaches and finally, the influential papers of the field.Comment: version 5.0 (updated on September 2018)- Preprint Version For our Accepted Journal @ ACM CSUR 2018 (42 pages) - This survey will be updated quarterly here (Send me your new published papers to be added in the subsequent version) History: Received November 2016; Revised August 2017; Revised February 2018; Accepted March 2018

Rating compiler optimizations for automatic performance tuning

To achieve maximum performance gains through compiler optimization, most automatic performance tuning systems use a feed-back directed approach to rate the code versions generated under different optimization options and to search for the best one. They all face the problem that code versions are only comparable if they run under the same execution context. This paper proposes three accurate, fast and flexible rating approaches that address this problem. The three methods identify comparable execution contexts, model relationships between contexts, or force re-execution of the code under the same context, respectively. We apply these methods in an automatic offline tuning scenario. Our performance tuning system improves the program performance of a selection of SPEC CPU 2000 benchmarks by up to 178 % (26 % on average). Our techniques reduce program tuning time by up to 96 % (80 % on average), compared to the state-of-the-art tuning scenario that compares optimization techniques using whole-program execution. 1