Enhancing software-hardware co-design for HEP by low-overhead profiling of single- and multi-threaded programs on diverse architectures with Adaptyst

TL;DR

Adaptyst is an open-source, architecture-agnostic profiling tool designed to improve software-hardware co-design for high-energy physics applications across diverse architectures, addressing limitations of existing tools like Linux perf.

Contribution

The paper introduces Adaptyst, a novel profiling tool that enhances hardware-software interaction analysis for complex applications on multiple architectures.

Findings

Adaptyst successfully profiles on- and off-CPU activity on x86-64, arm64, and RISC-V.

It addresses key limitations of Linux perf in hardware interaction analysis.

The tool is planned to evolve into a comprehensive co-design framework.

Abstract

Given the recent technological trends and novel computing paradigms spanning both software and hardware, physicists and software developers can no longer just rely on computers becoming faster to meet the ever-increasing computing demands of their research. Adapting systems to the new environment may be difficult though, especially in case of large and complex applications. Therefore, we introduce Adaptyst (formerly AdaptivePerf): an open-source and architecture-agnostic tool aiming for making these computational and procurement challenges easier to address. At the moment, Adaptyst profiles on- and off-CPU activity of codes, traces all threads and processes spawned by them, and analyses low-level software-hardware interactions to the extent supported by hardware. The tool addresses the main shortcomings of Linux "perf" and has been successfully tested on x86-64, arm64, and RISC-V instruction set architectures. Adaptyst is planned to be evolved towards a software-hardware co-design framework which scales from embedded to high-performance computing in both legacy and new applications and takes into account a bigger picture than merely choosing between CPUs and GPUs. Our paper describes the current development of the project and its roadmap.