Transferring Performance Prediction Models Across Different Hardware Platforms

Many software systems provide configuration options relevant to users, which are often called features. Features influence functional properties of software systems as well as non-functional ones, such as performance and memory consumption. Researchers have successfully demonstrated the correlation between feature selection and performance. However, the generality of these performance models across different hardware platforms has not yet been evaluated. We propose a technique for enhancing generality of performance models across different hardware environments using linear transformation. Empirical studies on three real-world software systems show that our approach is computationally efficient and can achieve high accuracy (less than 10% mean relative error) when predicting system performance across 23 different hardware platforms. Moreover, we investigate why the approach works by comparing performance distributions of systems and structure of performance models across different platforms.