US Patent 7797692 Estimating a dominant resource used by a computer program

A system that estimates a dominant computational resource which is used by a computer program. During operation, for each basic block in the computer program, the system determines a nesting level for the basic block. Next, the system selects basic blocks with nesting levels greater than a specified threshold. For each selected basic block, the system analyzes the basic block to estimate the dominant computational resource used by the basic block. The system then uses the estimated dominant computational resources for the selected basic blocks to estimate the dominant computational resource for the computer program.