Performance and environment monitoring for continuous program optimization

Our research is aimed at characterizing, understanding, and exploiting the interactions between hardware and software to improve system performance. We have developed a paradigm for continuous program optimization (CPO) that assists in and automates the challenging task of performance tuning, and we have implemented an initial prototype of this paradigm. At the core of our implementation is a performance- and environment-monitoring (PEM) component that vertically integrates performance events from various layers in the execution stack. CPO agents use the data provided by PEM to detect, diagnose, and alleviate performance problems on existing systems. In addition, CPO can be used to improve future architecture designs by analyzing PEM data collected on a whole-system simulator while varying architectural characteristics. In this paper, we present the CPO paradigm, describe an initial implementation that includes PEM as a component, and discuss two CPO clients.