research-article

More than meets the eye: invisible instructions

Authors:

Guilherme V. Leobas,

Breno C. F. Guimarães,

Fernando M. Q. PereiraAuthors Info & Claims

SBLP '18: Proceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages

Pages 27 - 34

https://doi.org/10.1145/3264637.3264641

Published: 20 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In modern software development, high-level languages are becoming progressively more feature-rich. The expressiveness and increased abstraction provided by these features allow programmers to be more productive and less concerned with low-level details. It is then the compiler's job to strip these layers of abstraction to actually implement its language's features. In contrast to average developers, compiler engineers operate within the compiler's infrastructure, looking for opportunities to optimize code or analyze programs. However, given their vantage point, these developers often assume that the program representation they use contains near-complete information of what will end up in the program's binary. We show that this is not quite the case. To this end, we introduce the notion of invisible instructions, which are present in the binary but are not visible in the program's compiler-generated intermediate representation. We use static analysis and profiling techniques to measure the prevalence of these instructions for a wide variety of programs in several benchmark suites, and show that for some instruction types, up to 36% of their occurrences on average are invisible.

References

[1]

Gene M. Amdahl. 1967. Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large Scale Computing Capabilities. In Proceedings of the April 18--20, 1967, Spring Joint Computer Conference (AFIPS '67 (Spring)). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 483--485.

Digital Library

[2]

Ron Cytron, Jeanne Ferrante, Barry K. Rosen, Mark N. Wegman, and F. Kenneth Zadeck. 1991. Efficiently Computing Static Single Assignment Form and the Control Dependence Graph. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 13, 4 (Oct. 1991), 451--490.

Digital Library

[3]

Arnaldo Carvalho De Melo. 2010. The new linuxfiperffitools. In Slides from Linux Kongress, Vol. 18.

[4]

Gregory J. Duck and Roland H. C. Yap. 2016. Heap Bounds Protection with Low Fat Pointers. In CC. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 132--142.

Digital Library

[5]

Sumit Gulwani. 2010. Dimensions in Program Synthesis. In Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13--24.

Digital Library

[6]

Sumit Gulwani. 2011. Automating String Processing in Spreadsheets Using Input-output Examples. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 317--330.

Digital Library

[7]

Sumit Gulwani, Susmit Jha, Ashish Tiwari, and Ramarathnam Venkatesan. 2011. Synthesis of Loop-free Programs. In Proceedings of the 32Nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 62--73.

Digital Library

[8]

Matthew R Guthaus, Jeffrey S Ringenberg, Dan Ernst, Todd M Austin, Trevor Mudge, and Richard B Brown. 2001. MiBench: A free, commercially representative embedded benchmark suite. In Workload Characterization, 2001. WWC-4. 2001 IEEE International Workshop on. IEEE, 3--14.

Digital Library

[9]

John L Henning. 2006. SPEC CPU2006 benchmark descriptions. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News 34, 4 (2006), 1--17.

Digital Library

[10]

Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve. 2004. LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis & Transformation. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization: Feedback-directed and Runtime Optimization (CGO '04). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 75--. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=977395.977673

Digital Library

[11]

Chunho Lee, Miodrag Potkonjak, and William H Mangione-Smith. 1997. Media-bench: A tool for evaluating and synthesizing multimedia and communications systems. In Microarchitecture, 1997. Proceedings., Thirtieth Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on. IEEE, 330--335.

Digital Library

[12]

Chi-Keung Luk, Robert Cohn, Robert Muth, Harish Patil, Artur Klauser, Geoff Lowney, Steven Wallace, Vijay Janapa Reddi, and Kim Hazelwood. 2005. Pin: Building Customized Program Analysis Tools with Dynamic Instrumentation. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 190--200.

Digital Library

[13]

Steven S. Muchnick. 1997. Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA.

Digital Library

[14]

Nicholas Nethercote and Julian Seward. 2007. Valgrind: A Framework for Heavy-weight Dynamic Binary Instrumentation. In PLDI. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 89--100.

Digital Library

[15]

David A Patterson and John L Hennessy. 2013. Computer Organization and Design MIPS Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface. Newnes.

Digital Library

[16]

Konstantin Serebryany, Derek Bruening, Alexander Potapenko, and Dmitry Vyukov. 2012. AddressSanitizer: A Fast Address Sanity Checker. In USENIX. USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 28--28.

Digital Library

[17]

Raja Vallée-Rai, Phong Co, Etienne Gagnon, Laurie Hendren, Patrick Lam, and Vijay Sundaresan. 1999. Soot - a Java Bytecode Optimization Framework. In CASCON. IBM Press, 13--.

[18]

Reinhold P Weicker. 1984. Dhrystone: a synthetic systems programming benchmark. Commun. ACM 27, 10 (1984), 1013--1030.

Digital Library

[19]

Jianzhou Zhao, Santosh Nagarakatte, Milo M.K. Martin, and Steve Zdancewic. 2013. Formal Verification of SSA-based Optimizations for LLVM. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175--186.

Digital Library

Cited By

Choi DKwak DCho MLee SBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)"Nobody Speaks that Fast!" An Empirical Study of Speech Rate in Conversational Agents for People with Vision ImpairmentsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376569(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376569
Pereira FLeobas GGamatié A(2018)Static Prediction of Silent StoresACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/328084815:4(1-26)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3280848

Index Terms

More than meets the eye: invisible instructions
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers

Recommendations

Increasing the Instruction Fetch Rate via Block-Structured Instruction Set Architectures

To exploit larger amounts of instruction level parallelism, processors are being built with wider issue widths and larger numbers of functional units. Instruction fetch rate must also be increased in order to effectively exploit the performance ...
The Superthreaded Processor Architecture

The common single-threaded execution model limits processors to exploiting only the relatively small amount of instruction-level parallelism available in application programs. The superthreaded processor, on the other hand, is a concurrent multithreaded ...
Chainsaw: Using Binary Matching for Relative Instruction Mix Comparison
PACT '09: Proceedings of the 2009 18th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques

With advances in hardware, instruction set architectures are undergoing continual evolution. As a result, compilers are under constant pressure to adapt and take full advantage of available features. However, current techniques for evaluating relative ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

SBLP '18: Proceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages

September 2018

108 pages

ISBN:9781450364805

DOI:10.1145/3264637

Program Chairs:
Carlos Camarão
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
,
Martin Sulzmann
Hochschule Karlsruhe - Technik und Wirtschaft

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 September 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico

Conference

SBLP 2018

SBLP 2018: XXII Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages

September 20 - 21, 2018

Sao Carlos, Brazil

Acceptance Rates

SBLP '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 29 submissions, 41%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 22 of 50 submissions, 44%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
44
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 06 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Choi DKwak DCho MLee SBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)"Nobody Speaks that Fast!" An Empirical Study of Speech Rate in Conversational Agents for People with Vision ImpairmentsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376569(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376569
Pereira FLeobas GGamatié A(2018)Static Prediction of Silent StoresACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/328084815:4(1-26)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3280848

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents