The design and architecture of MAQAOAdvisor: A live tuning guide

Abstract

Program performance is tightly linked to the assembly code, this is even more emphasized on EPIC architectures. Assessing precisely quality of compiled code is essential to deliver high performance. The most important step is to build a comprehensive summary for end-user and extract manageable information. In this paper, we present our first prototype called MAQAOAdvisor, a key MAQAO(Modular Assembly Quality Optimizer) module that drives the optimization process through assembly code analysis and performance evaluation. It performs comprehensive profiling, hot-loop and hot-spot detection, fast evaluation and guides local optimizations. An originality of MAQAOAdvisor is to deport part of optimizations from the driver to a post-compiler evaluation stage. It is based on static analysis and dynamic profile of assembly code. It feeds information back to help end-user detect and understand performance problems. It proposes optimization recommendations to guide a user to perform the best transformations to get the best performance. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.