Cross-Level Characterization of Program Execution

Abstract

Characterization of program execution plays a key role in performance improvement. There are numerous transformations applied to each step a program takes on its lowering from source code to a compiler intermediate representation to machine language to microarchitecture-specific execution. The unpredictable benefit of each transformation step could lead a notionally superior algorithm to exhibit inferior performance once actually run, and it can be opaque at what step in the transformation path contradicted the code developer's assumptions. However, conventional approaches to program execution characterization consider the behavior after only a single one of those steps, which limits the information that can be provided to the user. To help address the issue of myopic views of program execution, this paper presents a novel cross-level characterization approach for understanding the behavior of program execution at different levels in the process of writing, compiling, and running a program. We show that this approach provides a richer view of the sources of performance gains and losses and helps identify program execution in a more accurate manner.