On-the-fly detection of precise loop nests across procedures on a dynamic binary translation system

Abstract

Loop structures in programs have been regarded as a primary source of finding parallelism from sequential codes. In this paper, we present a new technique that dynamically detects precise loop structures with their inter-procedural nests on a dynamic binary translation system. Using precompiled application binary code as an input, our mechanism generates the simple but precise markers when they are loaded from their binary code image, and at runtime monitors loop structures with inter-procedural nesting on the fly using Loop-Call Context Graph. We implement our mechanism and evaluate it using SPEC CPU benchmark suite. The results show that our mechanism reveals precise loop structures with interprocedural loop nesting successfully. The results also show that ours can reduce overheads for loop analysis compared with the existing ones. These indicate that our mechanism can be applied to runtime optimization and parallelization as well as hints for performance tuning.