Reducing dynamic compilation overhead by overlapping compilation and execution

• Authors: P. Unnikrishnan;M. Kandemir;F. Li
• Venue: ASP-DAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
• Year: 2006

An important problem in executing applications in energy-sensitive embedded environments is to tune their behavior based on dynamic variations in energy constraints. One option for achieving this is dynamic compilation ---compiling code fragments on the fly to adapt to changing energy demands. While dynamic compilation can be very beneficial in many embedded environments where multiple criteria need to be satisfied during execution, it can also incur a significant performance overhead since compilation takes place at runtime. The goal in this work is to reduce this performance overhead of dynamic compilation by overlapping it with application execution. Specifically, provided that we have available hardware resources to perform dynamic compilation concurrently with application execution, our approach compiles the next code fragment to be executed while we are executing the current code fragment. The experimental results from our implementation indicate significant savings in execution times. Our experimental results also indicate that the proposed strategy performs consistently well under different parameters.