Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Today, multicore scalability poses increasing challenges to developers across all platforms frommobile to the data center. The intensive competition between the major processor vendors includingIntel, AMD, IBM, and ARM is leading new innovation in computer architecture that systemssoftware and application developers have only begun to take advantage of. There is an increasedcomplexity of developing software on these platforms where developers are now exposed morethan ever to the performance idiosyncrasies of the processor architecture. Impacting performance,performance isolation, and even security of their applications.The goal of this research is to provide the tools and insights to help developers make the bestuse of the hardware. We focus on three pieces: First, design and implement a continuous profilingsystem that will help developers make sense of the first, second and third order performance metricsavailable in modern processors. Second, build a portable runtime to help developers make optimaluse of the new instructions that allow applications to control cache behavior, arguably one of themost complex issues with the largest gain for developers. Third, explore the use of this runtimeand several new processor features for partitioning applications for performance, correctness, andsecurity.