Dynamic Code Region (DCR) based program phase tracking and prediction for dynamic optimizations

Detecting and predicting a program's execution phases are crucial to dynamic optimizations and dynamically adaptable systems. This paper shows that a phase can be associated with dynamic code regions embedded in loops and procedures which are primary targets of compiler optimizations. This paper proposes a new phase tracking hardware, especially for dynamic optimizations, that effectively identifies and accurately predicts program phases by exploiting program control flow information. Our proposed phase tracking hardware uses a simple stack and a phase signature table to track the change of phase signature between dynamic code regions. Several design parameters of our proposed phase tracking hardware are evaluated on 10 SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks. Our proposed phase tracking hardware effectively identifies a phase at a given granularity. It correctly predicts the next program phase for 84.9% of times with a comparable small performance variance within the same phase. A longer phase length and higher phase prediction accuracy together with a reasonably small performance variance are essential to build more efficient dynamic profiling and optimization systems.