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arXiv · 2509.25090

DarwinGame: Playing Tournaments for Tuning Applications in Noisy Cloud Environments

Rohan Basu Roy·Vijay Gadepally·Devesh Tiwari
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Abstract

This work introduces a new subarea of performance tuning -- performance tuning in a shared interference-prone computing environment. We demonstrate that existing tuners are significantly suboptimal by design because of their inability to account for interference during tuning. Our solution, DarwinGame, employs a tournament-based design to systematically compare application executions with different tunable parameter configurations, enabling it to identify the relative performance of different tunable parameter configurations in a noisy environment. Compared to existing solutions, DarwinGame achieves more than 27% reduction in execution time, with less than 0.5% performance variability. DarwinGame is the first performance tuner that will help developers tune their applications in shared, interference-prone, cloud environments.

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Rohan Basu Roy, Vijay Gadepally, Devesh Tiwari. 2025-09-29. DarwinGame: Playing Tournaments for Tuning Applications in Noisy Cloud Environments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25090

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