HARP: Holistic Analysis for Refactoring Python-Based Analytics Programs

Modern machine learning programs are often written in Python, with the main computations specified through calls to some highly optimized libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch). How to maximize the computing efficiency of such programs is essential for many application domains, which has drawn lots of recent attention. This work points out a common limitation in existing efforts: they focus their views only on the static computation graphs specified by library APIs, but leave the influence from the hosting Python code largely unconsidered. The limitation often causes them to miss the big picture and hence many important optimization opportunities. This work proposes a new approach named HARP to address the problem. HARP enables holistic analysis that spans across computation graphs and their hosting Python code. HARP achieves it through a set of novel techniques: analytics-conscious speculative analysis to circumvent Python complexities, a unified representation augmented computation graphs to capture all dimensions of knowledge related with the holistic analysis, and conditioned feedback mechanism to allow risk-controlled aggressive analysis. Refactoring based on HARP gives 1.3-3X and 2.07X average speedups on a set of TensorFlow and PyTorch programs.