CAREER: An Integrated Hardware and Software Performance Monitoring System

在过去的15年里，现代计算机中的处理器速度以比主存速度快得多的速度增长。 因此，顺序和并行计算机中的相对存储器容量已经变得相当大，并且继续快速增加。 这种趋势形成了这项研究的动机，它攻击了如何在面对巨大的处理器-内存性能差距时监控，分析和提高计算机性能的问题。 由于这种性能差距，开发性能监控系统变得越来越重要，该系统允许程序员、编译器编写人员和系统设计人员识别和调整其设计中内存开销限制性能的部分。 为了实现这些目标，该项目侧重于以下几个领域：（i）探索用于应用程序存储器性能分析的基于编译时和运行时软件的技术的混合，（ii）将这些混合监视技术与动态编译相结合以实现灵活的、低开销的、详细的性能工具，（iii）设计和实现新颖的、软件感知的，硬件性能监测技术，以及（iv）设计基于这种新的硬件支持的软件工具。 通过同时研究硬件和软件解决方案，可以深入了解每种方法的优缺点。 这项研究的最终结果是一套性能工具，它涵盖了所提供的监视细节级别和所需的硬件支持级别。

Over the past 15 years, processor speeds in modern computers have increased at a much faster rate than main memory speeds. Thus, relative memory latencies in both sequential and parallel computers have become quite large, and continue to increase rapidly. Such trends form the motivation for this research, which attacks the issues of how to monitor, analyze and improve computer performance in the face of a large processor-memory performance gap. Because of this performance gap, it becomes increasingly important to develop performance monitoring systems that allow programmers, compiler writers, and system designers to identify and tune portions of their design where memory overhead is limiting performance. To accomplish these goals, this project focuses on several area: (i) exploring hybrids of compile-time and run-time software-based techniques for application memory performance analysis, (ii) combining these hybrid monitoring techniques with dynamic compilation to implement flexible, low-overhead, detailed performance tools, (iii) designing and implementing novel, software-aware, hardware performance monitoring techniques, and (iv) designing software tools based on this novel hardware support. By studying both hardware and software solutions concurrently, one gains insights into the strong and weak points of each approach. The end result of this research is a suite of performance tools that span a range in the level of monitoring detail provided and the level of hardware support required.