COCO: CONTINUOUS COMPILATION

Compilers, Programming Languages, and Architecture Group
Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh

Strata: A Reconfigurable and Retargetable Software Dynamic Translator

Despite the many uses of software dynamic translation and the lively state of research on SDT, building SDT systems remains a significant challenge. In this project, to address the difficulty of building software dynamic translators and to promote research into novel uses of SDT, with investigators at the University of Virginia, we are developing an SDT implementation infrastructure called Strata. Strata provides a common framework in which researchers can build dynamic translators. Strata uses several novel techniques to reduce the cost of dynamic code translation, including partial inlining, indirect branch translation caching, fast returns, instruction trace formation, and fragment linking. To gather run-time information, Strata has facilities for dynamic instrumentation. Because instrumentation can be very expensive, Strata uses several novel optimizations that target instrumentation overhead, including instrumentation probe coalescing, partial context switches, code specialization and payload partial inlining.

News!

Bruce Childers and Jack Davidson will hold a tutorial at the ACM SIGMICRO International Conference Microarchitecture about Strata. Come join us in Barcelona, Spain, November 13, 2005 for the tutorial! The latest tutorial slides are now available!

Publications

All publications are available from the CoCo publication web site. Please select the tab above for the publications.

• Compile-time Planning for Overhead Reduction in Software Dynamic Translation, Naveen Kumar, Bruce R. Childers, Daniel Williams, Jack W. Davidson and Mary Lou Soffa, International Journal on Parallel Programming, Accepted December 2004, to appear.

• Instrumentation in Software Dynamic Translators for Self-Managed Systems, Naveen Kumar, Jonathan Misurda, Bruce R. Childers and Mary Lou Soffa, ACM SIGSOFT Workshop on Self-Managing Systems, during ACM SIGSOFT Foundations of Software Engineering, Newport Beach, California, October 2004

• Overhead Reduction Techniques for Software Dynamic Translation, Kevin Scott, Naveen Kumar, Bruce R. Childers, Jack W. Davidson, and Mary Lou Soffa, NSF Workshop on Next Generation Software, during the Int'l. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2004

• Compact Binaries with Code compression in a Software Dynamic Translator, Stacey Shogan and Bruce R. Childers, Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE'04), Paris, France, February 2004.

• Instrumentation for Software Dynamic Translation, Naveen Kumar and Bruce R. Childers, Workshop on Exploring the Trace Space for Dynamic Optimization Techniques, during the ACM Int'l. Conference on Supercomputing, San Francisco, California, June 2003.

• Retargetable and Reconfigurable Software Dynamic Translation, K. Scott, N. Kumar, S. Velusamy, B. Childers, J. Davidson, and M. L. Soffa, ACM SIGMICRO Int'l. Conf. on Code Generation and Optimization, San Francisco, March 2003.

• Continuous Compilation: A New Approach to Aggressive and Adaptive Code Transformation, Bruce R. Childers, Jack W. Davidson and Mary Lou soffa, NSF Workshop on Next Generation Software, held during the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Nice, France, April 2003.

Talks

• Continuous Compilation for Aggressive and Adaptive Code Transformation, Bruce R. Childers, Colloquium at Pennsylvania State University, November 11, 2004.

• Continuous Compilation: A New Approach to Aggressive and Adaptive Code Transformation (special emphasis on dynamic code instrumentation), Bruce R. Childers, Colloquium at COPPE - Systems Engineering and Computer Science Program, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 1, 2004. Please send Bruce Childers an e-mail for a copy of the presentation slides.

• Continuous Compilation: A New Approach to Aggressive and Adaptive Code Transformation (special emphasis on profit-driven optimization), Bruce R. Childers, Colloquium at Instituto de Informatica, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, June 30, 2004. Please send Bruce Childers an e-mail for a copy of the presentation slides.