ParaLog: enabling and accelerating online parallel monitoring of multithreaded applications

Instruction-grain lifeguards monitor the events of a running application at the level of individual instructions in order to identify and help mitigate application bugs and security exploits. Because such lifeguards impose a 10–100X slowdown on existing platforms, previous studies have proposed hardware designs to accelerate lifeguard processing. However, these accelerators are either tailored to a specific class of lifeguards or suitable only for monitoring singlethreaded programs. We present ParaLog, the first design of a system enabling fast online parallel monitoring of multithreaded parallel applications. ParaLog supports a broad class of software-defined lifeguards. We show how three existing accelerators can be enhanced to support online multithreaded monitoring, dramatically reducing lifeguard overheads. We identify and solve several challenges in monitoring parallel applications and/or parallelizing these accelerators, including (i) enforcing inter-thread data dependence...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Evangelos Vlachos, Michelle L. Goodstein, Michael A. Kozuch, Shimin Chen, Babak Falsafi, Phillip B. Gibbons, Todd C. Mowry
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2010, Instruction-grain Lifeguards, Lifeguards, Parallel Applications, Programming Languages