Prometheus: Coherent Exploration of Hardware and Software Optimizations using Aspen

Abstract

With the dramatic increase in scale expected for Exascale computing, there is a dire need for tuning of hardware configurations and software optimizations such that they are in unison. However, the expected increase in tunable hardware parameters makes searching through the design space for optimal hardware-and-software configurations much more challenging. Towards this end, we propose a composable hardware-software optimization framework called Prometheus. Prometheus uses a combination of analytical and machine-learning techniques to capture application characteristics and subsequently determine the hardware-software configuration for near-optimal performance. We evaluate Prometheus for its efficacy using four widely used proxy applications: LULESH, CoMD, CG and CoEVP. We demonstrate that Prometheus identifies near-optimal hardwaresoftware configurations and verify the results via brute-force search of the design space.