Abstract The paper presents the SmartGridRPC model, an extension of the GridRPC model, which aims to achieve higher performance. The traditional GridRPC provides a programming model and API for mapping individual tasks of an application in a distributed Grid environment, which is based on the client‐server model characterized by the star network topology. SmartGridRPC provides a programming model and API for mapping a group of tasks of an application in a distributed Grid environment, which is based on the fully connected network topology. The SmartGridRPC programming model and API and its performance advantages over the GridRPC model are outlined in this paper. In addition, experimental results using a real‐world application are also presented. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper describes the application of various search techniques to the problem of automatic empirical code optimization. The search process is a critical aspect of auto-tuning systems because the large size of the search space and the cost of evaluating the candidate implementations makes it infeasible to find the true optimum point by brute force. We evaluate the effectiveness of Nelder-Mead Simplex, Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, Particle Swarm Optimization, Orthogonal search, and Random search in terms of the performance of the best candidate found under varying time limits.

Previous studies have revealed that paravirtualization imposes minimal performance overhead on High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads, while exposing numerous benefits for this field. In this study, we are investigating the memory hierarchy characteristics of paravirtualized systems and their impact on automatically-tuned software systems. We are presenting an accurate characterization of memory attributes using hardware counters and user-process accounting. For that, we examine the proficiency of ATLAS, a quintessential example of an autotuning software system, in tuning the BLAS library routines for paravirtualized systems. In addition, we examine the effects of paravirtualization on the performance boundary. Our results show that the combination of ATLAS and Xen paravirtualization delivers native execution performance and nearly identical memory hierarchy performance profiles. Our research thus exposes new benefits to memory-intensive applications arising from the ability to slim down the guest OS without influencing the system performance. In addition, our findings support a novel and very attractive deployment scenario for computational science and engineering codes on virtual clusters and computational clouds.

The excessive complexity of both machine architectures and applications have made it difficult for compilers to statically model and predict application behavior. This observation motivates the recent interest in performance tuning using empirical techniques. We present a new embedded scripting language, POET (parameterized optimization for empirical tuning), for parameterizing complex code transformations so that they can be empirically tuned. The POET language aims to significantly improve the generality, flexibility, and efficiency of existing empirical tuning systems. We have used the language to parameterize and to empirically tune three loop optimizations - interchange, blocking, and unrolling - for two linear algebra kernels. We show experimentally that the time required to tune these optimizations using POET, which does not require any program analysis, is significantly shorter than that when using a full compiler-based source-code optimizer which performs sophisticated program analysis and optimizations.

Abstract This paper reports on the design of a Fortran‐to‐Java translator whose target language is the instruction set of the Java Virtual Machine. The goal of the translator is to generate Java implementations of legacy Fortran numerical codes in a consistent and reliable fashion. The benefits of directly generating bytecode are twofold. First, compared with generating Java source code, it provides a much more straightforward and efficient mechanism for translating Fortran GOTO statements. Second, it provides a framework for pursuing various compiler optimizations, which could be beneficial not only to our project, but to the Java community as a whole. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.