ECO: An Empirical-Based Compilation and Optimization System

In this paper, we describe a compilation system that automates much of the process of performance tuning that is currently done manually by application programmers interested in high performance. Due to the growing complexity of accurate performance prediction, our system incorporates empirical techniques to execute variants of code segments with representative data on the target architecture. In this paper, we discuss how empirical techniques and performance modeling can be effectively combined. We also discuss the role of historical information from prior runs, and programmer specifications supporting run-time adaptation. These techniques can be employed to alleviate some of the performance problems that lead to inefficiencies in key applications today: register pressure, cache conflict misses, and the trade-off between synchronization, parallelism and locality in SMPs.