University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

PICS - a Performance-analysis-based Introspective Control System to steer parallel applications

Sun, Yanhua

Content Files
SUN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78431

Description

Title
PICS - a Performance-analysis-based Introspective Control System to steer parallel applications
Author(s)
Sun, Yanhua
Issue Date
2015-04-23
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Kale, Laxmikant V.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Kale, Laxmikant V.
Committee Member(s)
  • Gropp, William D.
  • Kloeckner, Andreas
  • Balaji, Pavan
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2015-07-22T22:17:12Z
Keyword(s)
  • parallel computing
  • control points
  • runtime system
  • application reconfiguration
  • automatic performance analysis
  • large scale analysis
Abstract
Parallel programming has always been difficult due to the complexity of hardware and the diversity of applications. Although significant progress has been achieved over the years, attaining high parallel efficiency on large supercomputers for various applications is still quite challenging. As we go beyond the current scale of computers to those with peak capacities of an ExaFLOP/s, it is clear that an introspective and adaptive runtime system (RTS) will be critical to reduce programmers' tuning efforts by automatically handling the complexities of applications and machines. This is the motivation for my research on a Performance-analysis-based Introspective Control System - PICS. PICS intelligently steers parallel applications and runtime system configurations to achieve desired goals by utilizing expert knowledge to analyze performance data and adaptively reconfiguring applications. This thesis designs a holistic introspective control system for automatic performance tuning that combines the real-time performance analysis and performance steering to effectively automate the optimization. A few techniques are explored to make the parallel runtime system and applications more adaptive and controllable. Control points are defined for applications to interact with PICS. Decision tree based automatic performance analysis is implemented to significantly reduce the search space of multiple configurations. Parallel evaluation and sampling techniques are exploited to reduce the overhead of the system and to improve its scalability. In addition, the result of automatic performance analysis can be visualized to help developers manually tune their applications. The utility of PICS is demonstrated with several benchmarks and real- world applications.
Graduation Semester
2015-5
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78431
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2015 Yanhua Sun

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Computer Science
Dissertations and Theses from the Siebel School of Computer Science