Non-intrusive dynamic application profiler for detailed loop execution characterization

Application profiling - the process of monitoring an application to determine the frequency of execution within specific regions - is an essential step within the design process for many software and hardware systems. In this paper, we present an efficient innovative, non-intrusive dynamic application profiler (DAProf) capable of profiling an executing application by monitoring the application's short backwards branches and providing detailed profiling statistics for characterizing loop execution behavior. DAProf is ideally suited for hardware/software partitioning approaches in which detailed loop execution information is needed to provide accurate performance estimates. DAProf provides a profiling accuracy of greater than 90% with only an 11% area overhead compared to a small ARM9.