Evolving to Find Optimizations Humans Miss: Using Evolutionary Computation to Improve GPU Code for Bioinformatics Applications

GPUs are used in many settings to accelerate large-scale scientific computation, including simulation, computational biology, and molecular dynamics. However, optimizing codes to run efficiently on GPUs requires developers to have both detailed understanding of the application logic and significant knowledge of parallel programming and GPU architectures. This paper shows that an automated GPU program optimization tool, GEVO, can leverage evolutionary computation to find code edits that reduce the runtime of three important applications, multiple sequence alignment, agent-based simulation and molecular dynamics codes, by 28.9%, 29%, and 17.8% respectively. The paper presents an in-depth analysis of the discovered optimizations, revealing that (1) several of the most important optimizations involve significant epistasis, (2) the primary sources of improvement are application-specific, and (3) many of the optimizations generalize across GPU architectures. In general, the discovered optimizations are not straightforward even for a GPU human expert, showcasing the potential of automated program optimization tools to both reduce the optimization burden for human domain experts and provide new insights for GPU experts.