Patent attributes
The disclosure presents systems and methods to identify program workings sets, detect working set changes and estimate working set sizes. The system generates a highly compressed representation of the working set, called a working set signature, by hashing working set elements into a data structure and setting the entries touched. The working set signature identifies, or is a representation of, the working set. The system can detect a working set change by comparing the signatures of consecutive working sets using a metric called a relative signature distance. The working set size is estimated by counting the number of bits set in the signature. The system can be used to compactly represent various types of working sets such as instruction, data and branch working sets. The system can detect program working set changes (or phase changes) independent of any micro-architectural specification.
