Quantifying Throughput of Basic Blocks on ARM Microarchitectures by Static Code Analyzers: A Case Study on Kunpeng 920

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The performance of high-performance computing (HPC) and other real-world applications is becoming unpre-dictable as the micro-architecture of the modern central processing unit (CPU) turns to be more and more complex. As a consequence, predicting the execution time of a code snippet is notoriously difficult. Basic block throughput predictor, also known as static code analyzer, provides a ubiquitous way to predict the execution time of a basic block, which includes assembly code segments without jump-related instructions. In this article, we build a workflow to faithfully run, collect and analyze basic blocks from real-world applications. Several static code analyzers are introduced, compared and optimized to show which one performs better on accuracy and other metrics on Kunpeng 920 processor. Under extensive experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art 86.7% accuracy in predicting the throughput of all basic …