Profiling minisat based on user defined execution time -- GPROF

TL;DR

This paper explains gprof's architecture, how to profile programs with user-defined execution times, and demonstrates its application in optimizing Minisat for hardware acceleration by identifying parallelizable code sections.

Contribution

It provides a detailed understanding of gprof's data structures, proposes modifications for user-defined execution times, and applies this to optimize Minisat's performance.

Findings

Gprof's call graph data structure is crucial for profiling.

Modifying gprof allows simulation of execution time changes.

Application in Minisat shows potential for hardware acceleration.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the explanation of the architecture of profilers particularly gprof and how to profile a program according to the user defined input of execution time . Gprof is a profiler available open source in the package of binutils. Gprof records the flow of the program including the callee and caller information and their respective execution time. This information is represented in the form of a call graph. Profilers at the time of execution creates a call graph file which indicates the full flow of the program including the individual execution time as well. This paper aims at providing a better understanding of the data structure used to store the information and how is a profiler(gprof) actually using this data structure to give user a readable format. The next section of this paper solves one of the limitation of gprof i.e. edit the time of block of code without understanding the call graph. Any changes in the execution time of a particular block of code would affect the total execution time. So if we edit the gprof in such a way that its consistent and platform independent, then it can yield various results like testing execution time after parallelism, before even designing it by replacing the values with theoretical/emulated ones and see if the total execution time is getting reduced by a desired number or not? Gprof edit can help us figure out that what section of code can be parallelized or which part of code is taking the most time and which call or part can be changed to reduce the execution time. The last section of the paper walks through the application of gprof in minisat and how gprof helps in the hardware acceleration in minisat by suggesting which part to be parallelised and how does it affect the total percentage.