Ubiquitous Memory Introspection

Modern memory systems play a critical role in the performance of applications, but a detailed understanding of the application behavior in the memory system is not trivial to attain. It requires time consuming simulations and detailed modeling of the memory hierarchy, often using long address traces. It is increasingly possible to access hardware performance counters to count relevant events in the memory system, but the measurements are coarse-grained and better suited for performance summaries than providing instruction level feedback. The availability of a low cost, online, and accurate methodology for deriving finegrained memory behavior profiles can prove extremely useful for runtime analysis and optimization of programs. This paper presents a new methodology for Ubiquitous Memory Introspection (UMI). It is an online and lightweight methodology that uses fast mini-simulations to analyze short memory access traces recorded from frequently executed code regions. The simulations p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Qin Zhao, Rodric M. Rabbah, Saman P. Amarasinghe, Larry Rudolph, Weng-Fai Wong
• Keywords: CGO 2007, Memory Systems, Modern Memory Systems, Software Engineering, Ubiquitous Memory Introspection