Boosting Performance Optimization with Interactive Data Movement Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a static analysis and visualization tool that helps optimize data movement and reuse in applications without needing lengthy program executions, making performance tuning more interactive and efficient.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining static dataflow analysis with program simulations to visualize data movement and reuse directly on program representations.

Findings

Effective in guiding optimization decisions

Reduces need for lengthy program executions

Enhances interactive performance tuning

Abstract

Optimizing application performance in today's hardware architecture landscape is an important, but increasingly complex task, often requiring detailed performance analyses. In particular, data movement and reuse play a crucial role in optimization and are often hard to improve without detailed program inspection. Performance visualizations can assist in the diagnosis of performance problems, but generally rely on data gathered through lengthy program executions. In this paper, we present a performance visualization geared towards analyzing data movement and reuse to inform impactful optimization decisions, without requiring program execution. We propose an approach that combines static dataflow analysis with parameterized program simulations to analyze both global data movement and fine-grained data access and reuse behavior, and visualize insights in-situ on the program representation. Case studies analyzing and optimizing real-world applications demonstrate our tool's effectiveness in guiding optimization decisions and making the performance tuning process more interactive.