HPS: Hybrid Profiling Support

Key to understanding and optimizing complex applications, is the ability to dynamically monitor executing programs with low overhead and high accuracy. Toward this end, the authors present HPS, a Hybrid Profiling Support system. HPS employs a hardware/software approach to program sampling that transparently, efficiently, and dynamically samples an executing instruction stream. The system is an extension and application of Dynamic Instruction Stream Editing (DISE), a hardware technique that macro-expands instructions in the pipeline decode stage at runtime.