A Holistic Approach to Compiler-Assisted Optimization of Software Systems

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

National Science Foundation Distributed Systems Research CISE/CNS ABSTRACT PROPOSAL NUMBER: 0410918 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Debray, Saumya K. INSTITUTION: U of Arizona PROPOSAL TITLE: A Holistic Approach to Compiler-Assisted Optimization of Software Systems This project aims to improve computer software by considering the operating system and application programs running on a processor together in a holistic manner, and consider-ing global as well as individual behaviors of such systems. Each component of a com-puter system, i.e., the operating system and the different applications, runs in its own ad-dress space. Existing approaches to software optimization consider these components as isolated entities and assume nothing about the behavior of, or interactions with, other ad-dress spaces. This has the shortcoming that the software improvement process cannot take advantage of knowledge of interactions between code modules in the different ad-dress spaces. This project aims to develop tools and techniques to address this shortcom-ing. A key element in our approach is the use of compiler techniques in novel ways, and in particular, in a multi-address space systems context rather than a single address space application-level context. The impact of this work will be to improve the performance of software systems across a wide variety of contexts and according to several different metrics. In particular, we ex-pect to be able to improve user applications, operating systems kernels, and system ser-vices, with performance metrics that include execution speed, amount of memory re-quired, fault tolerance, and enhanced security. Our results will be disseminated in the form of publications describing our algorithms, experimental methodology and results, as well as software developed as part of the project, which we will make available via the World-wide web. Dr. Brett D. Fleisch Program Director, CISE/CNS June 24, 2004. .