Automatically Tuned Dynamic Programming with an Algorithm-by-Blocks

Abstract

As the complexity of current computer architecture increases, domain-specific program generators are extensively used to implement performance portable libraries. Dynamic programming is a performance-critical kernel in many applications including engineering operations and bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose an Automatically Tuned Dynamic Programming (ATDP) to optimize performance of dynamic programming algorithm across various architectures. First, an algorithm-by-blocks for dynamic programming is designed to facilitate optimizing with well-known techniques including cache and register tiling. Further, the parameterized algorithm-by-blocks is cooperative with an auto-tuning framework and leverages a hill climbing algorithm to search the possible best program on a given platform. The experiments on two x86 processors demonstrate that (i) the generated scalar programs improve performance by over 10 times, (ii) the vector programs further speedup the scalar ones by a factor of 4 and 2 for single-precision and double-precision, respectively.