Totalprof: a Fast and Accurate Retargetable Source Code Profiler
TotalProf: A Fast and Accurate Retargetable Source Code Profiler Lei Gao, Jia Huang, Jianjiang Ceng, Rainer Leupers, Gerd Ascheid, and Heinrich Meyr Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems RWTH Aachen University, Germany {gao,leupers}@iss.rwth-aachen.de ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Profilers play an important role in software/hardware de- Profiling is deemed of pivotal importance for embedded sign, optimization, and verification. Various approaches system design. On the one hand, profiles obtained from re- have been proposed to implement profilers. The most alistic workloads are indispensable in application, processor, widespread approach adopted in the embedded domain is and compiler design. On the other hand, profile-based pro- Instruction Set Simulation (ISS) based profiling, which pro- gram optimization (e.g., [5]) and parallelization (e.g., [7]) vides uncompromised accuracy but limited execution speed. play an increasingly important role in harnessing the pro- Source code profilers, on the contrary, are fast but less accu- cessing power of embedded processors. However, current rate. This paper introduces TotalProf, a fast and accurate profiling techniques face two major challenges: First, the source code cross profiler that estimates the performance stringent time-to-market pressure and the increasing com- of an application from three aspects: First, code optimiza- plexity of applications and systems require profiling tools to tion and a novel virtual compiler backend are employed to be fast and quickly available, so that they can be employed resemble the course of target compilation. Second, an opti- as early as possible in the evaluation of design variants. Sec- mistic static scheduler is introduced to estimate the behav- ond, the accuracy of profiles is imperative to capture the ior of the target processor’s datapath.
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