Enhancing the Power of Polyhedral-Based Optimizations with Coordinate-Based Hill Climbing

Abstract

This paper describes our experience extending the polyhedral compiler Pluto with a lightweight, coordinate-wise hill-climbing tuner that adjusts numeric transformation parameters, such as tile sizes and thread-block dimensions, after Pluto selects the kernel's loop structure. To ensure fast convergence and escape local minima, hill climbing is augmented with two techniques: expanded neighborhood exploration and a shortest-hop refinement phase. On x86 and ARM CPUs, tuned kernels outperform Pluto's default configuration (1.06-1.28x geometric mean speedup across 11 benchmarks) and static optimizers (Clang -O3, Polly, IOOpt), reaching performance competitive with the AutoTVM autotuner at substantially lower search cost. Applying the same technique to GPU thread-block allocation on an NVIDIA A100 yields 5.5-8.5% improvement over default configurations. These results position post-optimization parameter tuning as a practical middle ground between fixed-cost-model polyhedral compilation and full autotuning.