Application tuning through bottleneck-driven refactoring

Abstract

To fully utilize the power of current high performance computing systems, high productivity to the end user is critical. It is a challenge to map an application to the target architecture efficiently. Tuning an application for high performance remains a daunting task, and frequently involves manual changes to the program. Recently refactoring techniques are proposed to rewrite or reorganize programs for various software engineering purposes. In our research we explore combining performance analysis with refactoring techniques for automated tuning that we expect to greatly improve the productivity of application deployment. We seek to build a system that can apply appropriate refactoring according to the bottleneck discovered. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through the tuning of several scientific applications and kernels.