One widely used metric that measures data locality is reuse distance —the number of unique memory locations that are accessed between two consecutive accesses to a particular memory location. State-of-the-art techniques that measure reuse distance in parallel applications rely on simulators or binary instrumentation tools that incur large performance and memory overheads. Moreover, the existing sampling-based tools are limited to measuring reuse distances of a single thread and discard interactions among threads in multi-threaded programs. In this work, we propose ReuseTracker —a fast and accurate reuse distance analyzer that leverages existing hardware features in commodity CPUs. ReuseTracker is designed for multi-threaded programs and takes cache-coherence effects into account. By utilizing hardware features like performance monitoring units and debug registers, ReuseTracker can accurately profile reuse distance in parallel applications with much lower overheads than existing tools. It introduces only 2.9× runtime and 2.8× memory overheads. Our tool achieves 92% accuracy when verified against a newly developed configurable benchmark that can generate a variety of different reuse distance patterns. We demonstrate the tool’s functionality with two use-case scenarios using PARSEC, Rodinia, and Synchrobench benchmark suites where ReuseTracker guides code refactoring in these benchmarks by detecting spatial reuses in shared caches that are also false sharing and successfully predicts whether some benchmarks in these suites can benefit from adjacent cache line prefetch optimization.

Inter-thread communication is a vital performance indicator in shared-memory systems. Prior works on identifying inter-thread communication employed hardware simulators or binary instrumentation and suffered from inaccuracy or high overheads-both space and time-making them impractical for production use. We propose ComDetective, which produces communication matrices that are accurate and introduces low runtime and low memory overheads, thus making it practical for production use. ComDetective employs hardware performance counters to sample memory-access events and uses hardware debug registers to sample communicating pairs of threads. ComDetective can differentiate communication as true or false sharing between threads. Its runtime and memory overheads are only 1.30× and 1.27×, respectively, for the 18 applications studied under 500K sampling period. Using ComDetective, we produce insightful communication matrices for microbenchmarks, PARSEC benchmark suite, and several CORAL applications and compare the generated matrices against MPI counterparts. Guided by ComDetective, we optimize a few codes and achieve up to 13% speedup. CCS CONCEPTS • General and reference → Performance; • Software and its engineering → Multithreading; • Computer systems organization → Multicore architectures.

Summary Binding parallel tasks to cores according to a placement policy is one of the key aspects to achieve good performance in multicore machines because it can reduce on‐chip communication among parallel threads. Binding also prevents operating system from migrating threads, which improves data locality. However, there is no single mapping policy that works best among all different kinds of applications and platforms because each machine has a different topology and each application exhibits different communication pattern. Determining the best policy for a given application and machine requires extra programming effort. To relieve the programmer from that burden, we introduce BindMe, a thread binding library that assists programmer to bind threads to underlying hardware. BindMe incorporates state‐of‐the‐art mapping algorithms, which use communication pattern in an application to formulate an efficient task placement policy. We also introduce ChoiceMap, a communication aware mapping algorithm that respects mutual priorities of parallel tasks and performs a fair mapping by reducing communication volume among cores. We have tested BindMe and ChoiceMap with various applications from NAS parallel benchmark and Rodinia bechmark. Our results show that choosing a mapping policy that best suits the application behavior can increase its performance and no single policy gives the best performance across different applications.

SummaryWe propose ComDetective, an inter‐thread communication analyzer, and ReuseTracker, a reuse distance analyzer, that leverage the hardware features in AMD processors to support low‐overhead profiling. Both tools employ the instruction‐based sampling (IBS) facility and debug registers in AMD processors to detect inter‐thread communication and data reuse. Different from prior arts, ComDetective differentiates the communication into true and false sharing, and ReuseTracker measures reuse distance in private and shared caches by also considering cache line invalidation with low overhead. Both tools can attribute the communications and reuses to source code lines. To our knowledge these tools are two of the few profiling tools designed specifically for AMD x86 architectures using IBS. Our tools are timely and relevant considering the rise in numbers of AMD processor based data centers and HPC systems. We perform experiments to evaluate the accuracy and overheads of the proposed tools on an AMD machine with two‐socket EPYC 7352 processors. ComDetective exhibits high accuracy while introducing 5.14 runtime and 1.4 memory overheads. ReuseTracker also displays high accuracy, which is 95%, with 11.76 runtime and 1.46 memory overheads. These overheads are much lower than the overheads of existing simulators and code instrumentation‐based tools. Lastly, we demonstrate the usage of the tools by having ComDetective and ReuseTracker facilitate the code refactoring of two data mining benchmarks to improve their performance by up to 29%.

Precise event sampling is a profiling feature in commodity processors that can sample hardware events and accurately locate the instructions that trigger the events. This feature has been used in a large number of tools to detect application performance issues. Although precise event sampling is readily supported in modern multicore architectures, vendor supports exhibit great differences that affect their accuracy, stability, overhead, and functionality. This work presents the most comprehensive study to date on benchmarking the event sampling features of Intel PEBS and AMD IBS and performs in-depth analysis on key differences through series of microbenchmarks. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that PEBS allows finer-grained and more accurate sampling of hardware events, while IBS offers richer set of information at each sample though it suffers from lower accuracy and stability. Moreover, OS signal delivery, which is a common method used by the profiling software, introduces significant time overhead to the original overhead incurred by the hardware mechanisms in both PEBS and IBS. We also found that both PEBS and IBS have bias in sampling events across multiple different locations in a code. Lastly, we demonstrate how our findings on microbenchmarks under different thread counts hold for a full-fledged profiling tool that runs on the state-of-the-art Intel and AMD machines. Overall our detailed comparisons serve as a great reference and provide invaluable information for hardware designers and profiling tool developers.