Faculty Advisor
Evangelos Markatos
ICS-FORTH and the University of Crete

Grant
$15,000 funded 10/98

Funding
To provide support to develop a tool (MemSpyer) that performance debugs memory-intensive applications.

Current performance debugging tools (like prof/gprof) provide little information about the memory behavior of user applications. Users find it difficult to isolate memory bottlenecks and relate them back to sections of code that causes the bottleneck. In this project we develop a tool that animates the memory hierarchy performance of user programs and (at the same time) highlights the source code line where the program currently executes. In this way, users are able to monitor the memory performance of their program, spot performance bottlenecks and relate them back to the program segments that cause them.Our tool displays an entire memory hierarchy consisting of Instruction TLB, Data TLB, First Level Instruction Cache, First Level Data Cache and a Second Level Cache. The tool will animate the performance (measured in miss ratio) for each level of the memory hierarchy. The tool is even be able to display several instances of the same level of the memory hierarchy. Thus, once a user identifies a performance bottleneck, (s)he is able to pinpoint to the exact line of code that creates the problem.

Current Status as of 10/98
The work on this project is well under way.

Website
https://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/OS/cache.html