Deffe: A Data-efficient Framework for Performance Characterization in Domain-Specific Computing

Abstract

Predicting workload performance is a crucial task for many architecture and system research. In this paper we present De￿e, a framework to estimate the workload performances under varying architectural configurations. The infrastructure component of Deffe is based on scalable and easy-to-use open-source software components. By casting the performance modeling as transfer learning tasks, the modeling component of Deffe can leverage the learned knowledge on one workload, and “transfer” it to a new workload. Extensive experimental results show that the method can achieve superior testing accuracy with an effective reduction of 32-80x in terms of the amount of required training data.