Automatic Generation of High-Performance Trace Compressors

Program execution traces are frequently used in indus-try and academia. Yet, most trace-compression algo-rithms have to be re-implemented every time the trace format is changed, which takes time, is error prone, and often results in inefficient solutions. This paper describes and evaluates TCgen, a tool that automatically generates portable, customized, high-performance trace compres-sors. All the user has to do is provide a description of the trace format and select one or more predictors to com-press the fields in the trace records. TCgen translates this specification into C source code and optimizes it for the specified trace format and predictor algorithms. On average, the generated code is faster and compresses better than the six other compression algorithms we have tested. For example, a comparison with SBC, one of the best trace-compression algorithms in the current litera-ture, shows that TCgen’s synthesized code compresses SPECcpu2000 address traces 23 % more, decompresses them 24 % faster, and compresses them 1029 % faster