A Tool for Analysis and Visualization of Application Properties

Performance modeling comprises two important areas. First, it is necessary to identify and theoretically analyze what are the properties of the applications that impact performance, and how they impact performance. This requires the definition of mathematical or probabilistic models of the applications properties, or the application of advanced techniques, such as machine learning, to model and predict their impact in performance. The other aspect of performance analysis is to define the mechanisms to actually measure application properties. These approaches range from analysis of algorithms complexity to evaluation of the application execution on real hardware.
This report addresses the last topic and presents a tool developed within IBM for quantification of application properties. It integrates, in a single tool, several analyses of properties that were previously done independently—parallelism and data reuse—, and it extends traditional single-value metrics and reports properties over the entire execution. It is based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure as it enables an analysis that is language- and microarchitecture-independent.
This document serves as the deliverable for the documentation of characterization tools (item 3.15 in version 4 of the planning Gantt charts), and the tool described herein is part of the deliverables in Milestone 5 in version 4 of the planning Gantt charts.
Keyword: Caparros

By: Victoria Caparrós Cabezas

Published in: RZ3834 in 2012

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