Supporting Introspection: From Circuits to Software

September 20, 2006
Tim Sherwood | University of California, Santa Barbara

Modern computer systems are called on to deal with billions of events every second, whether they are instructions executed, memory locations accessed, or packets forwarded. Sifting through these data streams has many applications, from helping to identify attackers (e.g. intrusion detection), enabling higher performance (profiling), or assisting in debugging and reliability (introspection). As our applications and software continue to grow in complexity it is worth considering a redesigned computing device that supports online high-throughput deep event analysis as a first class citizen – everywhere from the circuits to the software. In particular I will talk about two complementary techniques. 3d-introspection (a circuit/architecture method) offers the potential of modular “snap-on” functionality that could be included with developer systems, and omitted from consumer systems to keep the cost impact to a minimum. We show that hardware stubs could be inserted into to commodity processors at design time that would allow analysis layers to bonded to development chips, and that these stubs have surprisingly low area and power overheads. Our second idea, Range Adaptive Profiling, is a new profiling method capable of automatically extracting hierarchy from streams of data (application, system, or hardware events) with unknown structure. In this talk, I will describe the concepts behind these idea, describe how they can be performed efficiently in software and hardware, and outline our recent prototyping work and extensions.

Speaker Details

Tim Sherwood is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the UC Santa Barbara. Before joining UCSB in 2003, he received his M.S. and Ph.D. from UC San Diego where he worked on processor adaptation and SimPoint with Professor Brad Calder. His current research interests include network and security processors, program phase analysis, and hardware support for software design. http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~sherwood