Low-overhead detection of memory access patterns and their time evolution

Abstract

We present a performance analysis tool that reports the temporal evolution of the memory access patterns of in-production applications in order to help analysts understand the accesses to the application data structures. This information is captured using the Precise Event Based Sampling (PEBS) mechanism from the recent Intel processors, and it is correlated with the source code and the nature of the performance bottlenecks if any. Consequently, this tool gives a complete approach to allow analysts to unveil the application behavior better, and to lead them to improvements while taking the most benefit from the system’s characteristics. We apply the tool to two optimized parallel applications and provide detailed insight of their memory access behavior, thus demonstrating the usefulness of the tool.