@inproceedings{0cca9e139d2f4f5487ae6aa13f68ac9c,
title = "PERDICE: Towards Discovering Software Inefficiencies Leading to Cache Misses and Branch Mispredictions",
abstract = "CPU cache misses and branch mispredictions waste CPU cycles and affect program performance. Such software inefficiencies could be neither eliminated by existing compilers nor avoided by developers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named PERDICE, to automatically discover such performance bugs by leveraging concolic execution. PERDICE adopts a new path exploration algorithm to discover such software inefficiencies. In particular, we measure performance losses in the granularity of program locations (e.g., instructions, source code lines) instead of paths to avoid getting stuck into the code without software inefficiencies. Moreover, when scoring test inputs, our new approach prefers the test inputs incurring increments in performance losses. This strategy allows PERDICE to avoid getting stuck into the software inefficiencies that have been found. We have implemented PERDICE for both PC (X86 instructions) and Android smartphones (ARM instructions). The experimental results with real-world desktop software and Android native code show that PERDICE outperforms the other four popular algorithms and PROFs (a multi-path performance profiler) in terms of the speed to discover software inefficiencies and the severity (i.e, amount of wasted CPU cycles) of inefficiencies.",
keywords = "Branch misprediction, Cache miss, Concolic execution, Path exploration, Software inefficiency",
author = "Ting Chen and Wanyu Huang and Muhui Jiang and Xiapu Luo and Lei Xue and Ying Wang and Xiaosong Zhang",
year = "2018",
month = jun,
day = "8",
doi = "10.1109/COMPSAC.2018.00044",
language = "English",
series = "Proceedings - International Computer Software and Applications Conference",
publisher = "IEEE Computer Society",
pages = "276--285",
editor = "Chung-Horng Lung and Ling Liu and Sorel Reisman and Hiroki Takakura and Claudio Demartini and Toyokazu Akiyama and Kamrul Hasan and Zhiyong Zhang and Ahamed, {Sheikh Iqbal} and Ji-Jiang Yang and Motonori Nakamura and Thomas Conte and Stelvio Cimato and Edmundo Tovar and William Claycomb",
booktitle = "Proceedings - 2018 IEEE 42nd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2018",
address = "United States",
note = "42nd IEEE Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2018 ; Conference date: 23-07-2018 Through 27-07-2018",
}