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Informed Memory Access Monitoring

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Performance Analysis of Parallel Applications for HPC

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Abstract

Memory monitoring is of critical use in understanding applications and evaluating systems. Due to the dynamic nature in programs’ memory accesses, common practice today leaves large amounts of address examination and data recording at runtime, at the cost of substantial performance overhead and large storage consumption for memory traces. Recognizing the memory access patterns available at compile time and redundancy in runtime checks, we propose a novel memory access monitoring and analysis framework, Spindle. Unlike methods delaying all checks to runtime or performing task-specific optimization at compile time, Spindle performs common static analysis to identify predictable memory access patterns into a compact program structure summary. Custom memory monitoring tools can then be developed on top of Spindle, leveraging the structural information extracted to dramatically reduce the amount of instrumentation that incurs heavy runtime memory address examination or recording. Our evaluation demonstrated the effectiveness of two Spindle-based tools, performing memory bug detection and trace collection, respectively, with a variety of programs. Results show that these tools can aggressively prune online memory monitoring processing, fulfilling desired tasks with performance overhead significantly reduced (\(2.54\times \) on average for memory bug detection and over \(200\times \) on average for access tracing, over state-of-the-art solutions).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jidong Zhai, Yuyang Jin, Wenguang Chen & Weimin Zheng

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  1. Jidong Zhai
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  2. Yuyang Jin
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  4. Weimin Zheng
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Zhai, J., Jin, Y., Chen, W., Zheng, W. (2023). Informed Memory Access Monitoring. In: Performance Analysis of Parallel Applications for HPC. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4366-1_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4366-1_4

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