Autopilot: adaptive control of distributed applications

With increasing development of applications for heterogeneous, distributed computing grids, the focus of performance analysis has shifted from a posteriori optimization on homogeneous parallel systems to application tuning for heterogeneous resources with time varying availability. This shift has profound implications for performance instrumentation and analysis techniques. Autopilot is a new infrastructure for dynamic performance tuning of heterogeneous computational grids based on closed loop control. The paper describes the Autopilot model of distributed sensors, actuators, and decision procedures, reports preliminary performance benchmarks, and presents a case study in which the Autopilot library is utilized in the development of an adaptive parallel input/output system.