SoftSig: software-exposed hardware signatures for code analysis and optimization

  • Authors:
  • James Tuck;Wonsun Ahn;Luis Ceze;Josep Torrellas

  • Affiliations:
  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL;University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Many code analysis techniques for optimization, debugging, or parallelization need to perform runtime disambiguation of sets of addresses. Such operations can be supported efficiently and with low complexity with hardware signatures. To enable flexible use of signatures, this paper proposes to expose a Signature Register File to the software through a rich ISA. The software has great flexibility to decide, for each signature,which addresses to collect and which addresses to disambiguate against. We call this architecture SoftSig. In addition, as an example of SoftSig use, we show how to detect redundant function calls efficiently and eliminate them dynamically. We call this algorithm MemoiSE. On average for five popular applications, MemoiSE reduces the number of dynamic instructions by 9.3%, thereby reducing the execution time of the applications by 9%.