"Friends Don't Let Friends Tune Code" by Jeff Hollingsworth

Fri Oct 26, 2012 1:00 PM

Location: 2117 Computer Science Instructional Center (CSI)

Tuning code for a specific system has often been necessary, but rarely enjoyable or easy. With many variants of a given architecture now being used in machines, for example the many implementations of the x86 instruction set, tuning has become even more difficult. In this talk, Dr. Hollingsworth will outline his work on the Active Harmony Auto-tuning system. He will also present some results showing that the performance of real codes can be improved, and that the best configuration can vary quite a bit even among very similar CPUs.

Dr. Hollingsworth's tool is capable of both online (tuning for a single execution) and offline (tuning using training runs) operations. He will also describe Parallel Rank Order, a core search algorithm.