Scientific software is often driven by multiple parameters that affect both
accuracy and performance. Since finding the optimal configuration of these
parameters is a highly complex task, it extremely common that the software is
used suboptimally. In a typical scenario, accuracy requirements are imposed,
and attained through suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present a
methodology for the automatic selection of parameters for simulation codes, and
a corresponding prototype tool. To be amenable to our methodology, the target
code must expose the parameters affecting accuracy and performance, and there
must be formulas available for error bounds and computational complexity of the
underlying methods. As a case study, we consider the particle-particle
particle-mesh method (PPPM) from the LAMMPS suite for molecular dynamics, and
use our tool to identify configurations of the input parameters that achieve a
given accuracy in the shortest execution time. When compared with the
configurations suggested by expert users, the parameters selected by our tool
yield reductions in the time-to-solution ranging between 10% and 60%. In other
words, for the typical scenario where a fixed number of core-hours are granted
and simulations of a fixed number of timesteps are to be run, usage of our tool
may allow up to twice as many simulations. While we develop our ideas using
LAMMPS as computational framework and use the PPPM method for dispersion as
case study, the methodology is general and valid for a range of software tools
and methods
