Abstract

Programmers often rely on performance analysis tools to provide feedback about the execution of their applications. However, the nature of this feedback is far from satisfactory. Often the feedback is purely descriptive and at a very low--level, making it difficult for the programmer to rectify performance problems. This dissertation demonstrates a new approach to performance tuning: prescriptive performance debugging. Our approach can greatly reduce the burdens imposed on the programmer compared to existing performance analysis tools. The basis of this approach is a set of requirements that must be satisfied by a performance analysis tool. In problem domains where these requirements can be met, a performance tool can prescribe source-level changes to improve performance. R x is one such tool that we have developed to improve the performance of explicitly parallel shared memory programs. R x targets inter-process synchronization and data communication, two significant sources of...

Citations