Your description is exactly right. We create a search space of all possible kernels and find the best ones based on runtime. The best heuristic is no heuristic.
This obviously creates a combinatorial problem that we mitigate with smarter search.
The kernels are run on the computer the compiler is running on. Since runtime is our gold standard it will search for the best configuration for your hardware target. As long as the setup is mostly the same, the optimizations should carry over, yes.
mcts / rl isn't really a heuristic. but yes heuristics can be used temporarily to keep the search space small, and removed over time as the search algorithm improves.
That depends on the model architecture and how it was written since that informs the size of the search space.
The typical range is 10 mins to 10 hours. It won't be fast but you only have to do it once and then those optimizations are set for every forward pass.
Do you learn the capabilities of the underlying hardware relative to the kernel src? You should be able to start predicting perf using learned static profiling.
This obviously creates a combinatorial problem that we mitigate with smarter search.
The kernels are run on the computer the compiler is running on. Since runtime is our gold standard it will search for the best configuration for your hardware target. As long as the setup is mostly the same, the optimizations should carry over, yes.