Implications of program phase behavior on timing analysis

Ravindar, Archan and Srikant, YN (2011) Implications of program phase behavior on timing analysis. In: 2011 15th Workshop on Interaction between Compilers and Computer Architectures (INTERACT), 12-12 Feb. 2011, San Antonio, TX.

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Abstract

Knowledge about program worst case execution time (WCET) is essential in validating real-time systems and helps in effective scheduling. One popular approach used in industry is to measure execution time of program components on the target architecture and combine them using static analysis of the program. Measurements need to be taken in the least intrusive way in order to avoid affecting accuracy of estimated WCET. Several programs exhibit phase behavior, wherein program dynamic execution is observed to be composed of phases. Each phase being distinct from the other, exhibits homogeneous behavior with respect to cycles per instruction (CPI), data cache misses etc. In this paper, we show that phase behavior has important implications on timing analysis. We make use of the homogeneity of a phase to reduce instrumentation overhead at the same time ensuring that accuracy of WCET is not largely affected. We propose a model for estimating WCET using static worst case instruction counts of individual phases and a function of measured average CPI. We describe a WCET analyzer built on this model which targets two different architectures. The WCET analyzer is observed to give safe estimates for most benchmarks considered in this paper. The tightness of the WCET estimates are observed to be improved for most benchmarks compared to Chronos, a well known static WCET analyzer.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to IEEE.
Keywords:	Worst Case Execution Time(WCET);Cycles Per Instruction (CPI);Measurement-Based WCET Analysis;Phase Behavior
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation
Date Deposited:	13 Mar 2013 10:28
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2013 10:28
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/45972

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