ADP: Automated diagnosis of performance pathologies using hardware events

Performance characterization of applications' hardware behavior is essential for making the best use of available hardware resources. Modern architectures offer access to many hardware events that are capable of providing information to reveal architectural performance bottlenecks throughout the core and memory hierarchy. These events can provide programmers with unique and powerful insights into the causes of the resource bottlenecks in their applications. However, interpreting these events has been a significant challenge. We present an automated system that uses machine learning to identify an application's performance problems. Our system provides programmers with insights about the performance of their applications while shielding them from the onerous task of digesting hardware events. It uses a decision tree algorithm, random forests on our micro-benchmarks to fingerprint the performance problems. Our system divides a profiled application into functions and automatically classifies each function by the dominant hardware resource bottlenecks. Using the classifications from the hotspot functions, we were able to achieve an average speedup of 1.73 from three applications in the PARSEC benchmark suite. Our system provides programmers with a guideline of where, what, and how to fix the detected performance problems in applications, which would have otherwise required considerable architectural knowledge.