Techniques and tools for dynamic optimization

Traditional code optimizers have produced significant performance improvements over the past forty years. While promising avenues of research still exist, traditional static and profiling techniques have reached the point of diminishing returns. The main problem is that these approaches have only a limited view of the program and have difficulty taking advantage of the actual run-time behavior of a program. We are addressing this problem through the development of a dynamic optimization system suited for aggressive optimization—using the full power of the most beneficial optimizations. We have designed our optimizer to operate using a software dynamic translation (SDT) execution system. Difficult challenges in this research include reducing SDT overhead and determining what optimizations to apply and where in the code to apply them. Another challenge is having the necessary tools to ensure the reliability of software that is dynamically optimized. In this paper, we describe our effo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Jason Hiser, Naveen Kumar, Min Zhao, Shukang Zhou, Bruce R. Childers, Jack W. Davidson, Mary Lou Soffa
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2006, SDT Overhead, Significant Performance Improvements, Traditional Code Optimizers