A History-Based Auto-Tuning Framework for Fast and High-Performance DNN Design on GPU

While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming increasingly popular, there is a growing trend to accelerate the DNN applications on hardware platforms like GPUs, FPGAs, etc., to gain higher performance and efficiency. However, it is time-consuming to tune the performance for such platforms due to the large design space and the expensive cost to evaluate each design point. Although many tuning algorithms, such as XGBoost tuner and genetic algorithm (GA) tuner, have been proposed to guide the design space exploring process in the previous work, the timing issue still remains a critical problem. In this work, we propose a novel auto-tuning framework to optimize the DNN operator design on GPU by leveraging the tuning history efficiently in different scenarios. Our experiments show that we can achieve superior performance than the state-of-the-art work, such as auto-tuning framework TVM and the handcraft optimized library cuDNN, while reducing the searching time by 8.96x and 4.58x comparing with XGBoost tuner and GA tuner in TVM.