Nitro: A Framework for Adaptive Code Variant Tuning

Autotuning systems intelligently navigate a search space of possible implementations of a computation to find the implementation(s) that best meets a specific optimization criteria, usually performance. This paper describes Nitro, a programmer-directed auto tuning framework that facilitates tuning of code variants, or alternative implementations of the same computation. Nitro provides a library interface that permits programmers to express code variants along with meta-information that aids the system in selecting among the set of variants at run time. Machine learning is employed to build a model through training on this meta-information, so that when a new input is presented, Nitro can consult the model to select the appropriate variant. In experiments with five real-world irregular GPU benchmarks from sparse numerical methods, graph computations and sorting, Nitro-tuned variants achieve over 93% of the performance of variants selected through exhaustive search. Further, we describe optimizations and heuristics in Nitro that substantially reduce training time and other overheads.