Parameterized Micro-benchmarking: An Auto-tuning Approach for Complex Applications

Auto-tuning has emerged as an important practical method for creating highly optimized code. However, the growing complexity of architectures and applications has resulted in a prohibitively large search space that preclude empirical auto-tuning. Here, we focus on the challenge to auto-tuning presented by applications that require auto-tuning of not just a small number of distinct kernels, but a large number of kernels that exhibit similar computation and memory access characteristics and require optimization over similar problem spaces. We propose an auto-tuning method for tensor contraction functions on GPUs, based on parameterized micro-benchmarks. Using our parameterized micro-benchmarking approach, we obtain a speedup of up to 2 over the version that used default optimizations without auto-tuning.