MapVisual: A Visualization Tool for Memory Access Patterns

TL;DR

MapVisual is a software tool that visualizes memory access patterns in three dimensions, aiding developers in analyzing irregular memory behaviors to optimize application performance.

Contribution

We introduce a novel visualization tool that performs memory tracing, profiling, and 3D visualization to analyze complex memory access patterns during application development.

Findings

Effective visualization of memory access patterns in 3D

Applicable to a variety of applications

Assists in optimizing memory performance

Abstract

Memory bandwidth is strongly correlated to the complexity of the memory access pattern of a running application. To improve memory performance of applications with irregular and/or unpredictable memory patterns, we need tools to analyze these patterns during application development. In this work, we present a software tool for the analysis and visualization of memory access patterns. We perform memory tracing and profiling, we do data processing and filtering, and we use visualization algorithms to produce three dimensional graphs that describe the patterns both in space and in time. Finally, we evaluate our toolflow on a variety of applications.