An infrastructure for multi-level optimisation through property annotation and aggregation

Abstract

Optimising software for efficiency on a parallel hardware platform by analysing the performance of the application is often a complex and time-consuming task. In this paper we present a constraint annotation and aggregation system that allows programmers to annotate code by using a dedicated language for describing functional and extrafunctional properties, such as for example algorithmic complexity, scaling factors or the number of required cores. The goal is to derive properties of the entire application that are parametrised over characteristics of the execution platform to assist programmers in better understanding the behaviour of an application and to assist the execution platform in making informed mapping and scheduling decisions.