Analysis of path profiling information generated with performance monitoring hardware

Even with the breakthroughs in semiconductor technology that enables billion transistor designs, hardware-based architecture paradigms alone cannot substantially improve processor performance. The challenge in realizing the full potential of these future machines is to find ways to adapt program behavior to application needs and processor resources. As such, run-time optimization has a distinct role in future high performance systems. However, as these systems are dependent on accurate, fine-grain profile information, traditional approaches to collecting profiles at run-time result in significant slowdowns during program execution. A novel approach to low-overhead profiling is to exploit hardware performance monitoring units (PMUs) present in modern microprocessors. The Itanium-2 PMU can periodically sample the last few taken branches in an executing program and this information can be used to recreate partial paths of execution. With compiler-aided analysis, the partial paths can be correlated into full paths. As statistically hot paths are most likely to occur in PMU samples, even infrequent sampling can accurately identify these paths. While traditional path profiling techniques carry a high overhead, a PMU-based path profiler represents an effective lightweight profiling alternative. This paper characterizes the PMU-based path information and demonstrates the construction of such a PMU-based path profiler for a run-time system.