Using HPM-Sampling to Drive Dynamic Compilation, Dries Buytaert, Andy Georges, Michael Hind, Matthew Arnold, Lieven Eeckhout, and Koen De Bosschere.

The paper abstract reads as follows.

All high-performance production JVMs employ an adaptive strategy for program execution. Methods are first executed unoptimized and then an online profiling mechanism is used to find a subset of methods that should be optimized during the same execution. This paper empirically evaluates the design space of
several profilers for initiating dynamic compilation and shows that existing online profiling schemes suffer from several limitations. They provide an insufficient number of samples, are untimely, and have limited accuracy at determining the frequently executed methods. We describe and comprehensively evaluate HPM-sampling, a simple but effective profiling scheme for finding optimization candidates using hardware performance monitors (HPMs) that addresses the aforementioned limitations. We show that HPM-sampling is more accurate; has low overhead; and improves performance by 5.7\% on average and up to 18.3\% when compared to the default system in Jikes RVM, without changing the compiler.

Montréal, here we come. October 21st – October 25th it is!

This paper has quite a long history behind it. Dries and I conceived the idea while attending the ACACES summerschool in July 2006. After a long talk with Mike, we decided to launch some preliminary measurements with the system Dries had already built into Jikes RVM using the HPM interface I had adapted from Steve Blackburn‘s perfctr patch for Jikes RVM. We intially targetted PLDI 2007, when some matters were brought to our attention, that questioned our original idea on the current state of the art. Submission was postponed, extra experiments were conducted and we targetted VEE instead, where our paper was rejected. Based on the reviews we received there, it seems like it was a border case, but a rejection nonetheless. So, we figured, why not submit to OOPSLA. Worst case scenario: we get additional reviews to improve our paper. I turns out that the Best Case Scenario was visited upon us instead. You can get a preprint version.