Tools

Temperature has become a strong constraint when designing high-performance processors. This comes both from miniaturization and from the difficulty to continue decreasing supply voltage without severely impairing performance. Recent processors feature on-chip thermal sensors that trigger power throttling when the processor becomes too hot. It is important for researchers to take into account this constraint.

Collective Optimization Database (cDatabase) is a collaborative repository with open API to share, reuse and reference useful/profitable optimization cases from the community including compiler optimizations and architecture configurations to improve code execution time, code and architecture size, compilation time, power consumption among others. Special web-services, plugins and cTools are provided/being developed to automate/predict program optimization, compiler tuning and architecture design using empirical iterative compilation, statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. cDatabase is intended to improve the quality of academic research by avoiding costly duplicate experiments and providing reproducible referable results.

CPPC (ComPiler for Portable Checkpointing) is a checkpointing tool focused on the insertion of fault tolerance into long-running message-passing applications. It is designed to allow for execution restart on different architectures and/or operating systems, also supporting checkpointing over heterogeneous systems, such as the Grid. It uses portable code and protocols, and generates portable checkpoint files while avoiding traditional solutions which add an unscalable overhead (such as runtime coordination or message-logging).

Diablo is a retargetable link-time binary rewriting framework. While our focus has been mostly on program compaction, binary rewriting has a much broader range of applications: speed optimizations, power consumption optimizations, size optimizations, program obfuscation and watermarking, instrumentation, etc. A binary rewriting framework is also very useful for program analysis and understanding. For instance, Diablo can print out the control flow graph for all functions in a program, annotated with for example liveness information.