Ivan R. Ivanov

The size and complexity of software applications is increasing at an accelerating pace. Source code repositories (along with their dependencies) require vast amounts of labor to keep them tested, maintained, and up to date. As the discipline now begins to also incorporate automatically generated programs, automation in testing and tuning is required to keep up with the pace - let alone reduce the present level of complexity. While machine learning has been used to understand and generate code in various contexts, machine learning models themselves are trained almost exclusively on static code without inputs, traces, or other execution time information. This lack of training data limits the ability of these models to understand real-world problems in software. In this work we show that inputs, like code, can be generated automatically at scale. Our generated inputs are stateful, and appear to faithfully reproduce the arbitrary data structures and system calls required to rerun a program function. By building our tool within the compiler, it both can be applied to arbitrary programming languages and architectures and can leverage static analysis and transformations for improved performance. Our approach is able to produce valid inputs, including initial memory states, for 90% of the ComPile dataset modules we explored, for a total of 21.4 million executable functions. Further, we find that a single generated input results in an average block coverage of 37%, whereas guided generation of five inputs improves it to 45%.

In order to come close to peak performance, accelerators like GPUs require significant architecture-specific tuning that understand the availability of shared memory, parallelism, tensor cores, etc. Unfortunately, the pursuit of higher performance and lower costs have led to a significant diversification of architecture designs, even from the same vendor. This creates the need for performance portability across different GPUs, especially important for programs in a particular programming model with a certain architecture in mind. Even when the program can be seamlessly executed on a different architecture, it may suffer a performance penalty due to it not being sized appropriately to the available hardware resources such as fast memory and registers, let alone not using newer advanced features of the architecture. We propose a new approach to improving performance of (legacy) CUDA programs for modern machines by automatically adjusting the amount of work each parallel thread does, and the amount of memory and register resources it requires. By operating within the MLIR compiler infrastructure, we are able to also target AMD GPUs by performing automatic translation from CUDA and simultaneously adjust the program granularity to fit the size of target GPUs. Combined with autotuning assisted by the platform-specific compiler, our approach demonstrates 27% geomean speedup on the Rodinia benchmark suite over baseline CUDA implementation as well as performance parity between similar NVIDIA and AMD GPUs executing the same CUDA program.