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Acovea analysis results against real world programs
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procyon112
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Joined: 28 Apr 2005
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2005 5:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
This is not too different from now, except for step 3


My contention is that it is step 2 that is significantly different. You want to evolve individuals that operate over a wider group of programs, so each individual should be tested against each benchmark and given a fitness score with a large penalty for breaking a benchmark. I see your point in the dangers of overoptimising for the domain, but I also question if your method of evolving seperately for each benchmark doesn't overoptimize for a domain that is so specific as to be meaningless. By filtering out the flag combinations that are "not nice", yet testing in aggregate, while it is true that the domain is still too specific to be taken as an absolute optimization for a real world situation, at least you are drawing out flag combinations that are mutually beneficial over a wider domain than a single benchmark.

I have read the original thread and it seems that the evidence of improved stability with the evolved set of flags seems to be more anecdotal, whereas this particular thread points out real stability problems compared with -O2. Since this particular case of MP3 encoding breaks frequently on aggressive optimization AND shows a decent benchmark, it might be very beneficial to add it, and any other known "breaking" benchmarks to the list so that we even further increase the domain space and end up with "nicer" flags. By adding test cases known to break, you can reduce the problem of strongly correlated flags prone to breaking apps and amplify the effect of strongly correlated flags that improve performance. This would make the flags more trustworthy for safety, and be able to more accurate prescribe a set of flags that the user should not "pick and choose" from for optimal stability AND performance.

My main beef is with the testing each benchmark seperately though, as I think that dilutes the data you are looking for.
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Hypnos
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2005 7:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There's probably no harm in mashing the codes together if the population is large enough, to capture the diversity of "friendly" flags; there would be technical difficulties in weighting the codes properly (not all take the same time to run, etc.).

A greater variety of codes would help, of course in relation to the real world. A wavelet code might be a nice addition.

Finally, the newest major version of Acovea (released a few days ago) can test on return value, not just stdout -- this might be useful for validating scientific codes that include test harnesses.
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