Bootstrapping Parameter Space Exploration for Fast Tuning

Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Nikhil Jain, Rushil Anirudh, Alfredo Giménez, Rahul Sridhar, Aniruddha Marathe, Tao Wang, Murali Emani, Abhinav Bhatele, Todd Gamblin

Abstract: The task of tuning parameters for optimizing performance or other metrics of interest such as energy, variability, etc. can be resource and time consuming. Presence of a large parameter space makes a comprehensive exploration infeasible. In this paper, we propose a novel bootstrap scheme, called GEIST, for parameter space exploration to find performance-optimizing configurations quickly. Our scheme represents the parameter space as a graph whose connectivity guides information propagation from known configurations. Guided by the predictions of a semi-supervised learning method over the parameter graph, GEIST is able to adaptively sample and find desirable configurations using limited results from experiments. We show the effectiveness of GEIST for selecting application input options, compiler flags, and runtime/system settings for several parallel codes including LULESH, Kripke, Hypre, and OpenAtom.