Program autotuning has been demonstrated in many domains to achieve better or more portable performance. However, autotuners themselves are often not very portable between projects because using a domain informed search space representation is critical to achieving good results and because no single search technique performs best for all problems.

OpenTuner is a new framework for building domain-specific multi-objective program autotuners. OpenTuner supports fully customizable configuration representations, an extensible technique representation to allow for domain-specific techniques, and an easy to use interface for communicating with the tuned program. A key capability inside OpenTuner is the use of ensembles of disparate search techniques simultaneously, techniques which perform well will receive larger testing budgets and techniques which perform poorly will be disabled.

A list of system dependencies can be found in debian-packages-deps which are primarily python 2.6+ (not 3.x) and sqlite3 (or your supported database backend of choice).

On Ubuntu/Debian there can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install `cat debian-packages-deps | tr '\n' ' '`

A list of python dependencies can be found in python-packages these can either be installed system-wide with pip or easy_install.

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install -r python-packages

Or you can use virtual env to create a isolated python environment by running:

python ./venv-bootstrap.py

which will create a ./venv/bin/python (./venv/Scripts/python.exe on windows) with all the required packages installed.

Quickly checking that a successful installation has been made, may be performed by running an example program such as:

./examples/rosenbrock/rosenbrock.py

• A tutorial for creating new techniques can be found here.

More coming soon!

• OpenTuner: An Extensible Framework for Program Autotuning.
  Jason Ansel, Shoaib Kamil, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Una-May O'Reilly, Saman Amarasinghe.
  MIT CSAIL Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2013-026. November 1, 2013.

The preferred way to contribute code to OpenTuner is to fork the project on github and submit a pull request. You can also submit a patch via email to [email protected].