Presentation
C.A.T.S.: Memory and Control Flow Tracing for Whole-Program Performance Analysis
SessionPerformance: Analysis Tools
DescriptionPerformance engineering often involves localized, bottleneck-based optimization, supported by a plethora of tools. When no apparent bottlenecks exist, engineers resort to coarser whole-program optimization, consisting of data layout, sparsity, allocation strategy, and algorithmic modifications, to name a few. In this work, we aim to codify whole-program optimization by providing three global views based on a single tracing format.
The format, called C.A.T.S., captures information necessary for static and runtime analysis of large applications. Instead of call stacks and function annotations, C.A.T.S. uses control flow stacks and memory events to identify common performance anti-patterns and potential optimizations.
We develop interactive timeline, dataflow, and access visualizations, and implement compiler analysis passes to extract C.A.T.S. traces statically and in seconds on consumer hardware. The visualizations and analyses are demonstrated on case studies including sparse computations, hydrodynamics, and climate modeling, yielding 3x memory footprint reduction, improvements in communication-computation overlap, code fusion, and data layouts.
The format, called C.A.T.S., captures information necessary for static and runtime analysis of large applications. Instead of call stacks and function annotations, C.A.T.S. uses control flow stacks and memory events to identify common performance anti-patterns and potential optimizations.
We develop interactive timeline, dataflow, and access visualizations, and implement compiler analysis passes to extract C.A.T.S. traces statically and in seconds on consumer hardware. The visualizations and analyses are demonstrated on case studies including sparse computations, hydrodynamics, and climate modeling, yielding 3x memory footprint reduction, improvements in communication-computation overlap, code fusion, and data layouts.
Event Type
Paper
TimeTuesday, 18 November 20251:30pm - 1:52pm CST
Location263-264
Performance Measurement, Modeling, & Tools