As computing becomes the major enabler in more and more fields, computing platforms also have become more heterogeneous than ever before to support different needs. Inevitably, high performance computing (HPC) centers and cloud vendors offer a diverse array of computing platforms to the user, often to a point where it overwhelms users as well as system managers. Therefore, a cross-platform performance prediction model, which leverages observations from one platform to predict performance on another, can be extremely valuable. However, building such a model for numerous platforms requires an enormous amount of effort to collect training data, which is often prohibitively expensive. To overcome this challenge, we propose$\times \text{AMM}^{1}$11Pronounced as “Exam”, an end-to-end Machine Learning (ML) pipeline that uses the attention mechanism, a transformative concept in generative AI, for two purposes: learning smart embeddings from raw application performance samples and constructing Abstract Machine Models (AMMs)-compact representations of machine properties. By integrating performance sample embeddings with AMMs where available, xAMM improves the accuracy of the state-of-the-art XGBoost model by 49.64 % for CPU$\rightarrow$CPU and 99.07 % for CPU$\rightarrow$GPU prediction compared to building the model using raw data, a common approach in the existing literature.

Leveraging an existing performance model to predict the runtime of a new application on a new system can save days and weeks of data collection time. However, knowledge transfer between High Performance Computing (HPC) systems can be challenging due to data heterogeneity caused by differences in data collection methods, architectural or application-specific individuality. This results in (1) sets of performance features that have significantly different names, orders, or the number of performance features that do not match between two datasets (heterogeneous domains), or (2) distribution shifts between datasets although their feature names match (homogeneous domains). While existing transfer learning techniques can handle mild distribution shifts, they fail to transfer knowledge when the source and target features do not match. This work introduces a novel transfer learning methodology-Cross Prediction Model (ModelX), which overcomes the large distribution discrepancy between homogeneous domains and enables transfer learning between heterogeneous domains. Extensive evaluations show that ModelX outperforms traditional transfer learning methods for all experiments using 11 HPC and 4 Machine Learning (ML) datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first methodology to enable knowledge transfer between two heterogeneous domains with no matching features. Finally, we demonstrate an application of ModelX to an HPC job scheduling scenario using real-world job traces where it helps to reduce the job turnaround time of a set of jobs by 71%.

High-performance computing system architectures are evolving rapidly, making exhaustive data collection for each architecture to build predictive performance models increasingly impractical. Concurrently, the arrival of new applications daily necessitates efficient performance prediction methods. Traditional data collection can take days or weeks, making it more efficient for scientists to leverage existing models to predict an application's performance on new architectures or use data from one application to predict another on the same architecture. The growing heterogeneity in applications and resources further complicates the exact matches needed for effective knowledge transfer. This work systematically studies various Machine Learning (ML) models to predict the relative performance of new applications on new platforms using existing data. Our findings demonstrate that few-shot learning using a few samples significantly enhances cross-platform knowledge transfer, multi-source models outperform single-source models, and Large Language Models (LLMs)-generated samples can effectively improve knowledge transfer efficacy.