Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Today, multicore scalability poses increasing challenges to developers across all platforms from mobile to the data center. The intensive competition between the major processor vendors including Intel, AMD, IBM, and ARM is leading new innovation in computer architecture that systems software and application developers have only begun to take advantage of. There is an increased complexity of developing software on these platforms where developers are now exposed more than 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 best use of the hardware. We focus on three pieces: First, design and implement a continuous profiling system that will help developers make sense of the first, second and third order performance metrics available in modern processors. Second, build a portable runtime to help developers make optimal use of the new instructions that allow applications to control cache behavior, arguably one of the most complex issues with the largest gain for developers. Third, explore the use of this runtime and several new processor features for partitioning applications for performance, correctness, and security.