Tel-Aviv University - Computer Science Colloquium

Sunday, November 21, 14:15-15:15
at 14:00

Room 309
Schreiber Building

DYNAMO: The Design of a Dynamic Program Optimizer

Evelyn Duesterwald

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Cambridge, MA

This talk describes the design and implementation of DYNAMO, a prototype
dynamic optimizer that is capable of accelerating the performance of a
native program binary at runtime. DYNAMO identifies and extracts the
dynamically hot code regions in the executing program binary and
achieves a performance boost by optimization and re-layout of these
regions. Initially, DYNAMO observes the program behavior through
interpretation and uses a very low overhead online profiling scheme to
identify and extract hot program paths.  Copies of the hot paths are
optimized using light-weight optimization techniques and emitted into a
software code cache. Subsequent execution instances of these traces
cause the cached version to be executed. Over time, the program's
working sets materialize inside the software code cache and execution
takes place increasingly more inside the cache based on the optimized
version of the input binary. DYNAMO is written entirely in user level
software, and runs on a PA-RISC machine under the HPUX operating system.
Our experimental evaluation of DYNAMO demonstrates that it is possible
to use a piece of software to improve the performance of a native,
statically optimized program binary, while it is executing.

For colloquium schedule, see http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~zwick/colloq.html