A lightweight tool for detecting inter-thread communication

Abstract

In a multicore environment, inter-thread communication can provide valuable insights about application performance. Literature detecting inter-thread communication either employs hardware simulators or binary instrumentation. Those techniques bring both space and time overhead, which makes them impractical to use on real-life applications. Instead, we take a completely different approach that leverages hardware performance counters and debug registers to detect communication volume between threads. The information generated by our tool can be utilized in several places to guide optimizations, understand performance behavior, and compare architectural features. In this talk, I present the design details of our tool along with experimental results on small to very large applications. I would like to note that this work is nominated for the best paper and the best student paper at SC19.