X-MAP: A Performance Prediction Tool for Porting Algorithms and Applications to Accelerator

Most modern high-performance computing systems comprise of one or more accelerators with varying architectures in addition to traditional multicore Central Processing Units (CPUs). Examples of these accelerators include Graphic Processing Units (GPU) and Intel's Many Integrated Cores architecture called Xeon Phi (PHI). These architectures provide massive parallel computation capabilities, which provide substantial performance benefits over traditional CPUs for a variety of scientific applications.;We know that all accelerators are not similar because each of them has their own unique architecture. This difference in the underlying architecture plays a crucial role in determining if a given accelerator will provide a significant speedup over its competition. In addition to the architecture itself, one more differentiating factor for these accelerators is the programming language used to program them. For example, Nvidia GPUs can be programmed using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and OpenCL while Intel Xeon PHIs can be programmed using OpenMP and OpenCL. The choice of programming language also plays a critical role in the speedup obtained depending on how close the language is to the hardware in addition to the level of optimization. With that said, it is thus very difficult for an application developer to choose the ideal accelerator to achieve the best possible speedup.;In light of this, we present an easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI) Tool called X-MAP which is a performance prediction tool for porting algorithms and applications to architectures which encompasses a Machine Learning based inference model to predict the performance of an application on a number of well-known accelerators and at the same time predict the best architecture and programming language for the application. We do this by collecting hardware counters from a given application and predicting run time by providing this data as inputs to a Neural Network Regressor based inference model. We predict the architecture and associated programming language by providing the hardware counters as inputs to an inference model based on Random Forest Classification Model.;Finally, with a mean absolute prediction error of 8.52 and features such as syntax highlighting for multiple programming languages, a function-wise breakdown of the entire application to understand bottlenecks and the ability for end users to submit their own prediction models to further improve the system, makes X-MAP a unique tool that has a significant edge over existing performance prediction solutions.