COLAB:A Collaborative Multi-factor Scheduler for Asymmetric Multicore Processors

Funding: Partially funded by the UK EPSRC grants Discovery: Pattern Discovery and Program Shaping for Many-core Systems (EP/P020631/1) and ABC: Adaptive Brokerage for Cloud (EP/R010528/1); Royal Academy of Engineering under the Research Fellowship scheme.Increasingly prevalent asymmetric multicore processors (AMP) are necessary for delivering performance in the era of limited power budget and dark silicon. However, the software fails to use them efficiently. OS schedulers, in particular, handle asymmetry only under restricted scenarios. We have efficient symmetric schedulers, efficient asymmetric schedulers for single-threaded workloads, and efficient asymmetric schedulers for single program workloads. What we do not have is a scheduler that can handle all runtime factors affecting AMP for multi-threaded multi-programmed workloads. This paper introduces the first general purpose asymmetry-aware scheduler for multi-threaded multi-programmed workloads. It estimates the performance of each thread on each type of core and identifies communication patterns and bottleneck threads. The scheduler then makes coordinated core assignment and thread selection decisions that still provide each application its fair share of the processor's time. We evaluate our approach using the GEM5 simulator on four distinct big.LITTLE configurations and 26 mixed workloads composed of PARSEC and SPLASH2 benchmarks. Compared to the state-of-the art Linux CFS and AMP-aware schedulers, we demonstrate performance gains of up to 25% and 5% to 15% on average depending on the hardware setup.Postprin

Iterative Compilation on Mobile Devices

The abundance of poorly optimized mobile applications coupled with their increasing centrality in our digital lives make a framework for mobile app optimization an imperative. While tuning strategies for desktop and server applications have a long history, it is difficult to adapt them for use on mobile phones. Reference inputs which trigger behavior similar to a mobile application's typical are hard to construct. For many classes of applications the very concept of typical behavior is nonexistent, each user interacting with the application in very different ways. In contexts like this, optimization strategies need to evaluate their effectiveness against real user input, but doing so online runs the risk of user dissatisfaction when suboptimal optimizations are evaluated. In this paper we present an iterative compiler which employs a novel capture and replay technique in order to collect real user input and use it later to evaluate different transformations offline. The proposed mechanism identifies and stores only the set of memory pages needed to replay the most heavily used functions of the application. At idle periods, this minimal state is combined with different binaries of the application, each one build with different optimizations enabled. Replaying the targeted functions allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of each set of optimizations for the actual way the user interacts with the application. For the BEEBS benchmark suite, our approach was able to improve performance by up to 57%, while keeping the slowdown experienced by the user on average at 0.8%. By focusing only on heavily used functions, we are able to conserve storage space by between two and three orders of magnitude compared to typical capture and replay implementations.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

LF-checker: Machine Learning Acceleration of Bounded Model Checking for Concurrency Verification (Competition Contribution)

We describe and evaluate LF-checker, a metaverifier tool based on machine learning. It extracts multiple features of the program under test and predicts the optimal configuration (flags) of a bounded model checker with a decision tree. Our current work is specialised in concurrency verification and employs ESBMC as a back-end verification engine. In the paper, we demonstrate that LF-checker achieves better results than the default configuration of the underlying verification engine

Autotuning OpenCL Workgroup Size for Stencil Patterns

Selecting an appropriate workgroup size is critical for the performance of OpenCL kernels, and requires knowledge of the underlying hardware, the data being operated on, and the implementation of the kernel. This makes portable performance of OpenCL programs a challenging goal, since simple heuristics and statically chosen values fail to exploit the available performance. To address this, we propose the use of machine learning-enabled autotuning to automatically predict workgroup sizes for stencil patterns on CPUs and multi-GPUs. We present three methodologies for predicting workgroup sizes. The first, using classifiers to select the optimal workgroup size. The second and third proposed methodologies employ the novel use of regressors for performing classification by predicting the runtime of kernels and the relative performance of different workgroup sizes, respectively. We evaluate the effectiveness of each technique in an empirical study of 429 combinations of architecture, kernel, and dataset, comparing an average of 629 different workgroup sizes for each. We find that autotuning provides a median 3.79x speedup over the best possible fixed workgroup size, achieving 94% of the maximum performance.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, presented at the 6th International Workshop on Adaptive Self-tuning Computing Systems (ADAPT '16

Minimizing the cost of iterative compilation with active learning

Since performance is not portable between platforms, engineers must fine-tune heuristics for each processor in turn. This is such a laborious task that high-profile compilers, supporting many architectures, cannot keep up with hardware innovation and are actually out-of-date. Iterative compilation driven by machine learning has been shown to be efficient at generating portable optimization models automatically. However, good quality models require costly, repetitive, and extensive training which greatly hinders the wide adoption of this powerful technique. In this work, we show that much of this cost is spent collecting training data, runtime measurements for different optimization decisions, which contribute little to the final heuristic. Current implementations evaluate randomly chosen, often redundant, training examples a pre-configured, almost always excessive, number of times – a large source of wasted effort. Our approach optimizes not only the selection of training examples but also the number of samples per example, independently. To evaluate, we construct 11 high-quality models which use a combination of optimization settings to predict the runtime of benchmarks from the SPAPT suite. Our novel, broadly applicable, methodology is able to reduce the training overhead by up to 26x compared to an approach with a fixed number of sample runs, transforming what is potentially months of work into days

Fast Automatic Heuristic Construction Using Active Learning

Building effective optimization heuristics is a challenging task which often takes developers several months if not years to complete. Predictive modelling has recently emerged as a promising solution, automatically constructing heuristics from training data. However, obtaining this data can take months per platform. This is becoming an ever more critical problem and if no solution is found we shall be left with out of date heuristics which cannot extract the best performance from modern machines. In this work, we present a low-cost predictive modelling approach for automatic heuristic construction which significantly reduces this training overhead. Typically in supervised learning the training instances are randomly selected to evaluate regardless of how much useful information they carry. This wastes effort on parts of the space that contribute little to the quality of the produced heuristic. Our approach, on the other hand, uses active learning to select and only focus on the most useful training examples. We demonstrate this technique by automatically constructing a model to determine on which device to execute four parallel programs at differing problem dimensions for a representative Cpu–Gpu based heterogeneous system. Our methodology is remarkably simple and yet effective, making it a strong candidate for wide adoption. At high levels of classification accuracy the average learning speed-up is 3x, as compared to the state-of-the-art