John Cavazos

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I was one of the first researchers to introduce the use of machine learning to optimize an optimizing compiler itself. Compilers typically contain many heuristics to solve hard problems approximately and efficiently. Finding heuristics that perform well on a broad range of applications and processors is one of the most complex tasks faced by compiler writers. My research involves using machine learning techniques to automatically construct compiler optimization heuristics. For example, I applied machine learning to construct an instruction scheduling heuristic, a heuristic that has been tuned for over 20 years with dozens of publications introducing small variations. Effectively, we removed a state-of-the-art heuristic and used machine learning to automatically generate a solution as good as the human-created solution [NIPS 1997]. We have shown that this technique can completely eliminate the human from heuristic design.  My research on applying machine learning to compiler optimizations received the NSF CAREER award in 2009.

Selected Publications (ALL):

* Using Graph-Based Program Characterization for Predictive Modeling.
Eunjung Park, John Cavazos, and Marco A. Alvarez.
CGO 2012

* A Transactional Memory with Automatic Performance Tuning.
  Qingping Wang, Sameer Kulkarni, John Cavazos, and Michael Spear.
HiPEAC 2012

* An Evaluation of Different Modeling Techniques for Iterative Compilation.
Eunjung Park, Sameer Kulkarni, and John Cavazos.
CASES 2011

* Predictive Modeling in a Polyhedral Optimization Space.
Eunjung Park, Louis-Noel Pouchet, John Cavazos, Albert Cohen, and P. Sadayappan.
CGO 2011 [PDF]

* Optimizing and Auto-tuning Belief Propagation on the GPU.
Scott Grauer-Gray and John Cavazos.
LCPC 2010 [PDF] 

* MPI-aware compiler optimizations for improving communication-computation overlap.
Anthony Danalis, Lori Pollock, Martin Swany, and John Cavazos.
ICS 2009 [PDF] 

* Iterative Optimization in the Polyhedral Model: Part II, Multidimensional Time.
Louis-Noel Pouchet, Cedric Bastoul, Albert Cohen, and John Cavazos.
PLDI 2008 [PDF]

New Book

* Software Automatic Tuning: From Concepts to State-of-the-Art Results.
Editors : Ken Naono, Keita Teranishi, John Cavazos, and Reiji Suda.
Springer 2011

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