Exploiting Program Phases

As ubiquitous computing continues to evolve, we are faced with the challenge of catering to the varied needs of an ever-increasing pool of diverse devices. Though the constraints and requirements for different devices may vary, performance and software quality are of paramount importance. Understanding program behavior is vital to both optimization amd program testing. Recently, there has been increasing interest in exploiting runtime behavior of programs in dynamic, program-aware optimizations in architectural and runtime systems [34, 2, 6, ?, 4, 28, 33]. A lot of reasearch has gone into characterizing time varying behavior of programs to better understand and exploit it [30, 33, 10, 13]. Phase analysis of programs is one such characterization. Phase analysis attempts to capture time-varying behavior and repeating patterns in a program’s execution by grouping periods of execution that are similar in a single phase. In this paper, we first present a survey on the time varying behavior of programs, its characterization, prediction, and use. Our aim is to exploit phase behavior of programs in novel and useful ways to enable high performance and software quality. To this end, we identify low-overhead program monitoring as an area of interest, and present a brief survey of extant low-overhead profiling techniques. Finally, we present our work on Phase-aware Remote Profiling and Visualization and Analysis of Phase Behavior in Java Programs and end with future directions.