A Practical Method For Quickly Evaluating Program.pptVIP

A Practical Method For Quickly Evaluating Program Optimizations Grigori Fursin, Albert Cohen, Michael O’Boyle and Olivier Temam ALCHEMY Group, INRIA Futurs and LRI, Paris-Sud Universit, France Institute for Computing Systems Architecture, University of Edinburgh, UK Outline Short background What’s problem we want to solve? How to solve the problem? The main challenges Result Conclusion Background Iterative optimization has great potential for a large range of optimization techniques; By running the program repeatedly, a new optimization technique is tested at each execution; What’s the problem of this evaluation approach? The problem of Iterative evaluation Problem: Optimization option space could be huge. An na?ve iterative search could be very time-consuming. e.g. The mgrid SpecFP2000 benchmark, it’s original execution time is 290s, if we have 32 optimization options, the total evaluation time will be 290x32=9280s. [Note: An optimization option is not necessarily a single optimization technique, it could be a combined set of techniques. ] Few work provides a practical approach for effectively applying iterative optimization. Can we do better? The idea is: Can we evaluate multiple optimization options in a single run of the program? To do this: This paper does some research on the programs. Other than knowing nothing about the programs as last two iterative papers said, this work takes advantage of an interesting property of many programs. The interesting thing is: The programs (scientific applications) tend to have some performance stability. Some papers has shown that many programs exhibit phases, i.e. program trace intervals of several millions instructions where performance is similar. What’s does phase mean? Phase is actually the stable consecutive periodic runs of the same piece of code. (e.g. time-consuming function calls, or big loop). A phase only corresponds to one piece of code; But one piece of code may have multiple phases; For example, if