Dynamic Application Profiling
Our non-intrusive dynamic application profiler (DAProf) is capable of profiling an executing application by monitoring the application’s short backwards branches, function calls, and function returns. The resulting profile information provides an accurate characterization of the frequently executed loops within the application providing a breakdown of loop executions versus loop iterations per execution. DAProf achieves excellent profiling accuracy with an average accuracy of 97% for loop executions, 97% for average iterations per execution, and 95% for percentage of total application execution time. In addition, the presented dynamic application profiler only incurs an 11% area overhead compared to an ARM9 microprocessor. DAProf is ideally suited for rapidly profiling software applications and dynamic optimization approaches such as warp processing in which detailed loop execution information is needed to provide accurate performance estimates.
Publications
- A. Nair, R. Lysecky. Non-Intrusive Dynamic Application Profiler for Detailed Loop Execution Characterization. International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES), 2008.
