Intel AnAlyzing PArAllel ProgrAms with Pin

Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0018-9162/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE Instrumentation is one tool for collecting the information needed to understand programs. Instrumentationbased tools typically insert extra code into a program to record events during execution.1-4 The cost of executing the extra code can be as low as a few cycles, enabling fine-grained observation down to the instruction level. Pin2 (www.pintool.org) is a software system that performs runtime binary instrumentation of Linux and Microsoft Windows applications. Pin’s aim is to provide an instrumentation platform for building a wide variety of program analysis tools, called pintools. By performing the instrumentation on the binary at runtime, Pin eliminates the need to modify or recompile the application’s source and supports the instrumentation of programs that dynamically generate code.