Concurrent Optimization for Multi-Core and Multithreaded Architectures

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

For future architectures, execution and compilation should no longer be thought of as separate activities. Instead, compilation should take place concurrently with execution. Concurrent optimization allows the processor to exploit available thread contexts for higher multithreaded performance in two ways -- it uses available thread contexts or cores to improve the quality of running code, and allows the processor to take full advantage of runtime information, with minimal overhead, to dynamically adapt the running code to the parallel architecture. This research will create a concurrent optimization system that uses available cores/contexts to continuously optimize a program's execution. The optimization system sits as a thin virtual machine layer underneath the operating system, optimizing the native ISA application binaries, libraries, and even operating system, tailoring each to the runtime behavior of the system. The optimization system will dynamically search the optimization space trying different compiler optimizations and levels of optimization to hot traces finding the most aggressive combination of optimizations to achieve the best possible performance.