research-article

ELFies: executable region checkpoints for performance analysis and simulation

Authors:

Alexander Isaev,

Trevor E. CarlsonAuthors Info & Claims

CGO '21: Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

Pages 126 - 136

https://doi.org/10.1109/CGO51591.2021.9370340

Published: 17 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

We address the challenge faced in characterizing long-running workloads, namely how to reliably focus the detailed analysis on interesting execution regions. We present a set of tools that allows users to precisely capture any region of interest in program execution, and create a stand-alone executable, called an ELFie, from it. An ELFie starts with the same program state captured at the beginning of the region of interest and then executes natively. With ELFies, there is no fast-forwarding to the region of interest needed or the uncertainty of reaching the region. ELFies can be fed to dynamic program-analysis tools or simulators that work with regular program binaries. Our tool-chain is based on the PinPlay framework and requires no special hardware, operating system changes, recompilation, or re-linking of test programs. This paper describes the design of our ELFie generation tool-chain and the application of ELFies in performance analysis and simulation of regions of interest in popular long-running single and multi-threaded benchmarks.

References

[1]

C.-K. Luk, R. S. Cohn, R. Muth, H. Patil, A. Klauser, P. G. Lowney, S. Wallace, V. J. Reddi, and K. M. Hazelwood, "Pin: building customized program analysis tools with dynamic instrumentation," in Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), Jun. 2005. pp. 190--200.

Digital Library

[2]

T. E. Carlson, W. Heirman, S. Eyerman, I. Hur, and L. Eeckhout, "An evaluation of high-level mechanistic core models," Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), pp. 28:1--28:25, Aug. 2014.

Digital Library

[3]

T. E. Carlson, W. Heirman, and L. Eeckhout, "Sniper: Exploring the level of abstraction for scalable and accurate parallel multicore simulation," in International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), Nov. 2011. pp. 52:1--52:12.

Digital Library

[4]

N. Binkert, B. Beckmann, G. Black, S. K. Reinhardt, A. Saidi, A. Basu, J. Hestness, D. R. Hower, T. Krishna, S. Sardashti, R. Sen, K. Sewell, M. Shoaib, N. Vaish, M. D. Hill, and D. A. Wood, "The gem5 simulator," SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 1--7, Aug. 2011.

Digital Library

[5]

T. Sherwood, E. Perelman, G. Hamerly, and B. Calder, "Automatically characterizing large scale program behavior," in International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Oct. 2002. pp. 45--57.

Digital Library

[6]

T. E. Carlson, W. Heirman, and L. Eeckhout, "Sampled simulation of multi-threaded applications," in International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Apr. 2013. pp. 2--12.

[7]

T. E. Carlson, W. Heirman, K. Van Craeynest, and L. Eeckhout, "Barrierpoint: Sampled simulation of multi-threaded applications," in International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Jun. 2014. pp. 2--12.

[8]

"Pinpoints from Intel," https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/pin-a-binary-instrumentation-tool-pinpoints.html.

[9]

"SPEC CPU2006 and Simulation," https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/research/simpoint.html.

[10]

"SPEC CPU2017 and Simulation," https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/research/simpoint.html.

[11]

"Tool Interface Standard (TIS) Executable and Linking Format (ELF) Specification Version 1.2," http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/elf/elf.pdf, May 1995.

[12]

H. Patil, C. Pereira, M. Stallcup, G. Lueck, and J. Cownie, "PinPlay: A framework for deterministic replay and reproducible analysis of parallel programs," in International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), Apr. 2010. pp. 2--11.

Digital Library

[13]

Intel, "Program Record/Replay Toolkit," http://www.pinplay.org.

[14]

"Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace," http://criu.org.

[15]

S. Narayanasamy, C. Pereira, H. Patil, R. Cohn, and B. Calder, "Automatic logging of operating system effects to guide application-level architecture simulation," in Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS), Jun. 2006. pp. 216--227.

Digital Library

[16]

"Pinball2elf (Intel)," http://github.com/intel/pinball2elf, http://pinelfie.org.

[17]

Intel, "Intel® 64 and IA-32 architectures software developer's manual volume 1: Basic architecture," http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures-software-developer-manuals.html, 2016.

[18]

"Pintool Regions," https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/pintool-regions.

[19]

D. Aarno and J. Engblom, Software and System Development Using Virtual Platforms: Full-System Simulation with Wind River Simics, 1st ed. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 2014. ISBN 978-0-12-800725-9

Digital Library

[20]

"Intel Software Development Emulator," http://www.intel.com/software/sde.

[21]

J. Bucek, K.-D. Lange, and J. v. Kistowski, "SPEC CPU2017: Next-generation compute benchmark," in International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), Apr. 2018. pp. 41--42.

Digital Library

[22]

C. Pereira, H. Patil, and B. Calder, "Reproducible simulation of multithreaded workloads for architecture design exploration," in IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), Sep. 2008. pp. 173--182.

[23]

J. Ringenberg and T. N. Mudge, "SuiteSpecks and SuiteSpots: A methodology for the automatic conversion of benchmarking programs into intrinsically checkpointed assembly code," in International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Apr. 2009. pp. 227--237.

[24]

J. Ansel, K. Arya, and G. Cooperman, "DMTCP: Transparent checkpointing for cluster computations and the desktop," in International Symposium on Parallel Distributed Processing (IPDPS), May 2009. pp. 1--12.

Digital Library

Cited By

Liu CSabu AChaudhari AKang QCarlson T(2024)Pac-Sim: Simulation of Multi-threaded Workloads using Intelligent, Live SamplingACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/368054821:4(1-26)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3680548
Hajiabadi AAgarwal ADiavastos ACarlson TDe V(2024)Levioso: Efficient Compiler-Informed Secure SpeculationProceedings of the 61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference10.1145/3649329.3655894(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649329.3655894
Mu WZhang YHuang BGuo JCui SVerbrugge CLhoták OShen X(2023)A Hotspot-Driven Semi-automated Competitive Analysis Framework for Identifying Compiler Key OptimizationsProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction10.1145/3578360.3580255(216-227)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578360.3580255
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

ELFies: executable region checkpoints for performance analysis and simulation
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Performance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software organization and properties

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

The CSI Framework for Compiler-Inserted Program Instrumentation
SIGMETRICS '18

The CSI framework provides comprehensive static instrumentation that a compiler can insert into a program-under-test so that dynamic-analysis tools - memory checkers, race detectors, cache simulators, performance profilers, code-coverage analyzers, etc. ...
Decoupled lifeguards: enabling path optimizations for dynamic correctness checking tools
PLDI '10: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Dynamic correctness checking tools (a.k.a. lifeguards) can detect a wide array of correctness issues, such as memory, security, and concurrency misbehavior, in unmodified executables at run time. However, lifeguards that are implemented using dynamic ...
The CSI Framework for Compiler-Inserted Program Instrumentation

The CSI framework provides comprehensive static instrumentation that a compiler can insert into a program-under-test so that dynamic-analysis tools - memory checkers, race detectors, cache simulators, performance profilers, code-coverage analyzers, etc. -...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CGO '21: Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

February 2021

395 pages

ISBN:9781728186139

General Chair:
Jae W. Lee
Seoul National University, South Korea

Sponsors

In-Cooperation

IEEE CS

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 17 September 2021

Check for updates

Badges

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CGO '21

Sponsor:

CGO '21: 19th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

February 27 - March 3, 2021

Virtual Event, Republic of Korea

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 312 of 1,061 submissions, 29%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
126
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)16
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 19 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Liu CSabu AChaudhari AKang QCarlson T(2024)Pac-Sim: Simulation of Multi-threaded Workloads using Intelligent, Live SamplingACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/368054821:4(1-26)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3680548
Hajiabadi AAgarwal ADiavastos ACarlson TDe V(2024)Levioso: Efficient Compiler-Informed Secure SpeculationProceedings of the 61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference10.1145/3649329.3655894(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649329.3655894
Mu WZhang YHuang BGuo JCui SVerbrugge CLhoták OShen X(2023)A Hotspot-Driven Semi-automated Competitive Analysis Framework for Identifying Compiler Key OptimizationsProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction10.1145/3578360.3580255(216-227)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578360.3580255
Pashrashid AHajiabadi ACarlson TMitra TYoung EXiong J(2022)Fast, Robust and Accurate Detection of Cache-Based Spectre Attack PhasesProceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.1145/3508352.3549330(1-9)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3508352.3549330

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten