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Cho, Younghyun

Publications and source records attributed to Cho, Younghyun.

Parallelizing autotuning for HPC applications: Unveiling the potential of the speculation strategy in Bayesian optimization

In the exascale computing era, tuning High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications has become a significant computational challenge. Although Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged as a promising tool for HPC performance tuning, the BO workflow is inherently sequential (i.e., one function evaluation at a time) and cannot leverage the huge amount of parallel resources present in modern supercomputers, resulting in a considerable underutilization of their computational capabilities. This paper explores the trade-off between search quality and parallelism in BO, investigating a diverse set of methods. Building upon both previous approaches from the literature and novel methodologies introduced in this work, our study provides a deep analysis to accelerate BO performance tuning. By examining a set of synthetic functions and practical HPC applications, our exploration analyzes the interaction among various BO methods for parallelization, the quantity of parallel resources, the runtime distribution of target HPC applications, and the costs associated with different search orchestration mechanisms that have been overlooked in previous studies. Compared to sequential BO, our novel methodology achieves comparable quality while demonstrating robust scalability in search time as the amount of parallel resources increases; it also outperforms a state-of-the-art tuner, which supports parallelization, achieving up to 3.67x faster search time. We provide high-value insights for practitioners seeking to leverage the power of parallel computing for efficient HPC application tuning. Additionally, to further assist researchers in accelerating the performance tuning of their HPC applications, we provide an extension of an existing open-source tuning framework that incorporates our methods.

Bayesian optimization↗

Surrogate-Based Autotuning for Randomized Sketching Algorithms in Regression Problems

Algorithms from Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (RandNLA) are known to be effective in handling high-dimensional computational problems, providing high-quality empirical performance as well as strong probabilistic guarantees. However, their practical application is complicated by the fact that the user needs to set various algorithm-specific tuning parameters which are different from those used in traditional NLA. This paper demonstrates how a surrogate-based autotuning approach can be used to address fundamental problems of parameter selection in RandNLA algorithms. In particular, we provide a detailed investigation of surrogate-based autotuning for sketch-and-precondition (SAP)-based randomized least squares methods, which have been one of the great success stories in modern RandNLA. Empirical results show that our surrogate-based autotuning approach can achieve near-optimal performance with much less tuning cost than a random search (up to about 7.6x fewer trials of different parameter configurations). Moreover, while our experiments focus on least squares, our results demonstrate a general-purpose autotuning pipeline applicable to any kind of RandNLA algorithm.

Cho, Younghyun↗

Non-smooth Bayesian optimization in tuning scientific applications

Tuning algorithmic parameters to optimize the performance of large, complicated computational codes is an important problem involving finding the optima and identifying regimes defined by non-smooth boundaries in black-box functions. Within the Bayesian optimization framework, the Gaussian process surrogate model produces smooth mean functions, but functions in the tuning problem are often non-smooth, which is exacerbated by the fact that we usually have limited sequential samples from the black-box function. Here, motivated by these issues encountered in tuning, we propose a novel Gaussian process model called a clustered Gaussian process (cGP), where the components are dynamically updated by clustering. In our studies, the performance of cGP can be better than stationary GPs in nearly 90% of the experiments and better than non-stationary GPs in nearly 70% of the repeated experiments while requiring less computational cost. cGP provides a novel approach for dynamic GP, computes more efficiently than recursive partitioning, and discovers non-smoothness regimes. We provide extensive experiments including high-performance computing (HPC) and industrial simulation functions to show the effectiveness of our methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hybrid Parameter Search and Dynamic Model Selection for Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization

Herein this article presents a new type of hybrid model for Bayesian optimization (BO) adept at managing mixed variables, encompassing both quantitative (continuous and integer) and qualitative (categorical) types. Our proposed new hybrid models (named hybridM) merge the Monte Carlo Tree Search structure (MCTS) for categorical variables with Gaussian Processes (GP) for continuous ones. hybridM leverages the upper confidence bound tree search (UCTS) for MCTS strategy, showcasing the tree architecture’s integration into Bayesian optimization. Our innovations, including dynamic online kernel selection in the surrogate modeling phase and a unique UCTS search strategy, position our hybrid models as an advancement in mixed-variable surrogate models. Numerical experiments underscore the superiority of hybrid models, highlighting their potential in Bayesian optimization.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗