CAREER: An Integrated Hardware and Software Performance Monitoring System

在过去的15年里，现代计算机中处理器速度的增长速度远远快于主内存的速度。因此，在顺序和并行计算机中的相对存储延迟都变得相当大，并且继续快速增加。这些趋势形成了这项研究的动机，该研究旨在解决如何在处理器和内存之间存在巨大性能差距的情况下监控、分析和提高计算机性能的问题。由于这种性能差距，开发性能监视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优其设计中内存开销限制性能的部分。为了实现这些目标，本项目集中在以下几个方面：(I)探索基于编译时和运行时软件的混合应用程序内存性能分析技术；(Ii)将这些混合监控技术与动态编译相结合，实现灵活、低开销、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控技术；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，您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，这些工具涵盖了所提供的监控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.