Large program trace analysis and compression with ZDDs

Prior work has shown that reduced, ordered, binary decision diagrams (BDDs) can be a powerful tool for program trace analysis and visualization. Unfortunately, it can take hours or days to encode large traces as BDDs. Further, techniques used to improve BDD performance are inapplicable to large dynamic program traces. This paper explores the use of ZDDs for compressing dynamic trace data. Prior work has show that ZDDs can represent sparse data sets with less memory compared to BDDs. This paper demonstrates that (1) ZDDs do indeed provide greater compression for sets of dynamic traces (25% smaller than BDDs on average), (2) with proper tuning, ZDDs encode sets of dynamic trace data over 9× faster than BDDs, and (3) ZDDs can be used for all prior applications of BDDs for trace analysis and visualization.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Graham D. Price, Manish Vachharajani
• Keywords: CGO 2010, Dynamic Trace, Dynamic Trace Data, Program Traces, Software Engineering