Section: Research Program

Profiling and Execution Behavior Modeling

Participants : Alain Ketterlin, Philippe Clauss, Salwa Kobeissi.

The increasing complexity of programs and hardware architectures makes it ever harder to characterize beforehand a given program's run time behavior. The sophistication of current compilers and the variety of transformations they are able to apply cannot hide their intrinsic limitations. As new abstractions like transactional memories appear, the dynamic behavior of a program strongly conditions its observed performance. All these reasons explain why empirical studies of sequential and parallel program executions have been considered increasingly relevant. Such studies aim at characterizing various facets of one or several program runs, e.g., memory behavior, execution phases, etc. In some cases, such studies characterize more the compiler than the program itself. These works are of tremendous importance to highlight all aspects that escape static analysis, even though their results may have a narrow scope, due to the possible incompleteness of their input data sets.