Performance tuning, software/hardware co-design, and job scheduling are among the many tasks that rely on models to predict application performance. We propose and evaluate low-rank tensor decomposition for modeling application performance. We discretize the input and configuration domains of an application using regular grids. Application execution times mapped within grid-cells are averaged and represented by tensor elements. We show that low-rank canonical-polyadic (CP) tensor decomposition is effective in approximating these tensors. We further show that this decomposition enables accurate extrapolation of unobserved regions of an application's parameter space. We then employ tensor completion to optimize a CP decomposition given a sparse set of observed execution times. We consider alternative piecewise/grid-based models and supervised learning models for six applications and demonstrate that CP decomposition optimized using tensor completion offers higher prediction accuracy and memory-efficiency for high-dimensional performance modeling.

Scalable QR factorization algorithms for solving least squares and eigenvalue problems are critical given the increasing parallelism within modern machines. We introduce a more general parallelization of the CholeskyQR2 algorithm and show its effectiveness for a wide range of matrix sizes. Our algorithm executes over a 3D processor grid, the dimensions of which can be tuned to trade-off costs in synchronization, interprocessor communication, computational work, and memory footprint. We implement this algorithm, yielding a code that can achieve a factor of Θ(P1/6) less interprocessor communication on P processors than any previous parallel QR implementation. Our performance study on Intel Knights-Landing and Cray XE supercomputers demonstrates the effectiveness of this CholeskyQR2 parallelization on a large number of nodes. Specifically, relative to ScaLAPACK's QR, on 1024 nodes of Stampede2, our CholeskyQR2 implementation is faster by 2.6x3.3x in strong scaling tests and by 1.1x-1.9x in weak scaling tests.