Memory profiling for intra-application data-communication quantification: A survey

Abstract

With the advent of technology, multi-core architectures are prevalent in embedded, general-purpose as well as high-performance computing. Efficient utilization of these platforms in an architecture agnostic way is an extremely challenging task. Hence, profiling tools are essential for programmers to optimize the applications for these architectures and understand the bottlenecks. Typical bottlenecks are irregular memory-access patterns and data-communication among cores which may reduce anticipated performance improvement. In this study, we first survey the memory-access optimization profilers. Thereafter, we provide a detailed comparison of data-communication profilers and highlight their strong and weak aspects. Finally, recommendations for improving existing data-communication profilers and/or designing future ones are thoroughly discussed.