A role for Pareto optimality in mining performance data

Improvements in performance modeling and identification of computational regimes within software libraries is a critical first step in developing software libraries that are truly agile with respect to the application as well as to the hardware. It is shown here that Pareto ranking, a concept from multi-objective optimization, can be an effective tool for mining large performance datasets. The approach is illustrated using software performance data gathered using both the public domain LAPACK library and an asynchronous communication library based on IBM LAPI active message library.