Helium: lifting high-performance stencil kernels from stripped x86 binaries to halide DSL code

Highly optimized programs are prone to bit rot, where performance quickly becomes suboptimal in the face of new hardware and compiler techniques. In this paper we show how to automatically lift performance-critical stencil kernels from a stripped x86 binary and generate the corresponding code in the high-level domain-specific language Halide. Using Halide’s state-of-the-art optimizations targeting current hardware, we show that new optimized versions of these kernels can replace the originals to rejuvenate the application for newer hardware. The original optimized code for kernels in stripped binaries is nearly impossible to analyze statically. Instead, we rely on dynamic traces to regenerate the kernels. We perform buffer structure reconstruction to identify input, intermediate and output buffer shapes. We from a forest of concrete dependency trees which contain absolute memory addresses to symbolic trees suitable for high-level code generation. This is done by canonicalizing tree...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Charith Mendis, Jeffrey Bosboom, Kevin Wu, Shoaib Kamil, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Sylvain Paris, Qin Zhao, Saman P. Amarasinghe
• Keywords: PLDI 2015, Programming Languages