Whence to Learn? Transferring Knowledge in Configurable Systems using BEETLE

TL;DR

BEETLE is a novel transfer learning framework that efficiently identifies relevant source data for configuring complex software systems, reducing measurement costs while maintaining or improving configuration quality.

Contribution

Introduces BEETLE, a bellwether-based transfer learning method that outperforms existing approaches in software configuration tasks by focusing on the most relevant source data.

Findings

BEETLE matches or exceeds state-of-the-art performance.

Requires only one-seventh of the measurements of competing methods.

Effective across diverse software systems.

Abstract

As software systems grow in complexity and the space of possible configurations increases exponentially, finding the near-optimal configuration of a software system becomes challenging. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning performance models based on a sample set of configurations. However, collecting enough sample configurations can be very expensive since each such sample requires configuring, compiling, and executing the entire system using a complex test suite. When learning on new data is too expensive, it is possible to use \textit{Transfer Learning} to "transfer" old lessons to the new context. Traditional transfer learning has a number of challenges, specifically, (a) learning from excessive data takes excessive time, and (b) the performance of the models built via transfer can deteriorate as a result of learning from a poor source. To resolve these problems, we propose a novel transfer learning framework called BEETLE, which is a "bellwether"-based transfer learner that focuses on identifying and learning from the most relevant source from amongst the old data. This paper evaluates BEETLE with 57 different software configuration problems based on five software systems (a video encoder, an SAT solver, a SQL database, a high-performance C-compiler, and a streaming data analytics tool). In each of these cases, BEETLE found configurations that are as good as or better than those found by other state-of-the-art transfer learners while requiring only a fraction ($\frac{1}{7}$th) of the measurements needed by those other methods. Based on these results, we say that BEETLE is a new high-water mark in optimally configuring software.