A tool for characterizing and succinctly representing the data access patterns of applications

Abstract

Application address streams contain a wealth of information that can be used to characterize the behavior of applications. However, the collection and handling of address streams is complicated by their size and the cost of collecting them. We present PSnAP, a compression scheme specifically designed for capturing the fine-grained patterns that occur in well structured, memory intensive, high performance computing applications. PSnAP profiles are human readable and reveal a great deal of information about the application memory behavior. In addition to providing insight to application behavior the profiles can be used to replay a proxy synthetic address stream for analysis. We demonstrate that the synthetic address streams mimic very closely the behavior of the originals.