IncProf: Efficient Source-Oriented Phase Identification for Application Behavior Understanding

Long running applications often have varying behaviors, here called phases. While considerable work in computer architecture has been done in identifying application phases based on how the hardware is being exercised, comparatively less work has been focused on identifying application phases based on regions of source code being executed. In this paper we introduce a new methodology and an efficient tool framework, IncProf, for observing and capturing the time-varying source execution behavior of applications, and for then deducing application phases from the resulting data. Uses of this capability include simply better understanding the varying behavior of long running applications, and for efficiently tracking deployed application performance in the future by providing information to identify good instrumentation points.