Looking Beyond Performance: Processors for Time Travel

Опубликовано 7 сентября 2016, 16:56

The processor industry is at an inflection point. In the past, performance was the driving force behind the processor industry. But in the coming many-core era, improving programmability and reliability of the system will be at least as important as improving raw performance. To meet this vision, I will present a processor feature called BugNet that assists programmers in understanding software failures. Reproducing software failures is a significant challenge. The problem is severe especially for multi-threaded programs because the causes of failure can be non-deterministic in nature. BugNet continuously logs a program's execution while sacrificing verylittle performance (~1). If the program crashes, the developer can use the log to debug the failure by time traveling to a past instant in failed program's execution time. I will also talk about two software tools built using the BugNet logging mechanism. One is a data race analysis tool, which is currently used at Microsoft. Another is a tool that enabled Intel to easily port their ASIM architectural simulator to Mac OSX, whichwas never attempted before because of the effort involved.