Cross-Level Characterization of Program Behavior : (Extended Poster Abstract)

Program behavior can be defined as a collection of executions [1]. Program behavior strongly relates to actual program performance but can be complicated to be characterized and analyzed. Characterization is important as it helps better understand program behavior by measuring various operations a program performs. There are many existing techniques [2]–[7] for program characterization, which operate at different levels of instrumentation: source code, intermediate representation (IR), instruction set architecture (ISA), and CPU microarchitecture. Each of these levels provides different capabilities and limitations. In this paper, we introduce Cross-Level Characterization (CLC), an analysis of similarities and differences in resource counts as measured at each level of instrumentation during a program’s transformation from source code through execution on a specific microarchitecture.