What is IACA and how do I use it?

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2019-04: Reached EOL. Suggested alternative: LLVM-MCA

2017-11: Version 3.0 released (latest as of 2019-05-18)

2017-03: Version 2.3 released

What it is:

IACA (the Intel Architecture Code Analyzer) is a (2019: end-of-life) freeware, closed-source static analysis tool made by Intel to statically analyze the scheduling of instructions when executed by modern Intel processors. This allows it to compute, for a given snippet,

  • In Throughput mode, the maximum throughput (the snippet is assumed to be the body of an innermost loop)
  • In Latency mode, the minimum latency from the first instruction to the last.
  • In Trace mode, prints the progress of instructions through their pipeline stages.

when assuming optimal execution conditions (All memory accesses hit L1 cache and there are no page faults).

IACA supports computing schedulings for Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake processors as of version 2.3 and Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake as of version 3.0.

IACA is a command-line tool that produces ASCII text reports and Graphviz diagrams. Versions 2.1 and below supported 32- and 64-bit Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and analysis of 32-bit and 64-bit code; Version 2.2 and up only support 64-bit OSes and analysis of 64-bit code.

How to use it:

IACA’s input is a compiled binary of your code, into which have been injected two markers: a start marker and an end marker. The markers make the code unrunnable, but allow the tool to find quickly the relevant pieces of code and analyze them.

You do not need the ability to run the binary on your system; In fact, the binary supplied to IACA can’t run anyways because of the presence of the injected markers in the code. IACA only requires the ability to read the binary to be analyzed. Thus it is possible, using IACA, to analyze a Haswell binary employing FMA instructions on a Pentium III machine.

C/C++

In C and C++, one gains access to marker-injecting macros with #include "iacaMarks.h", where iacaMarks.h is a header that ships with the tool in the include/ subdirectory.

One then inserts the markers around the innermost loop of interest, or the straight-line chunk of interest, as follows:

/* C or C++ usage of IACA */

while(cond){
    IACA_START
    /* Loop body */
    /* ... */
}
IACA_END

The application is then rebuilt as it otherwise would with optimizations enabled (In Release mode for users of IDEs such as Visual Studio). The output is a binary that is identical in all respects to the Release build except with the presence of the marks, which make the application non-runnable.

IACA relies on the compiler not reordering the marks excessively; As such, for such analysis builds certain powerful optimizations may need to be disabled if they reorder the marks to include extraneous code not within the innermost loop, or exclude code within it.

Assembly (x86)

IACA’s markers are magic byte patterns injected at the correct location within the code. When using iacaMarks.h in C or C++, the compiler handles inserting the magic bytes specified by the header at the correct location. In assembly, however, you must manually insert these marks. Thus, one must do the following:

    ; NASM usage of IACA
    
    mov ebx, 111          ; Start marker bytes
    db 0x64, 0x67, 0x90   ; Start marker bytes
    
.innermostlooplabel:
    ; Loop body
    ; ...
    jne .innermostlooplabel ; Conditional branch backwards to top of loop

    mov ebx, 222          ; End marker bytes
    db 0x64, 0x67, 0x90   ; End marker bytes

It is critical for C/C++ programmers that the compiler achieve this same pattern.

What it outputs:

As an example, let us analyze the following assembler example on the Haswell architecture:

.L2:
    vmovaps         ymm1, [rdi+rax] ;L2
    vfmadd231ps     ymm1, ymm2, [rsi+rax] ;L2
    vmovaps         [rdx+rax], ymm1 ; S1
    add             rax, 32         ; ADD
    jne             .L2             ; JMP

We add immediately before the .L2 label the start marker and immediately after jne the end marker. We then rebuild the software, and invoke IACA thus (On Linux, assumes the bin/ directory to be in the path, and foo to be an ELF64 object containing the IACA marks):

iaca.sh -64 -arch HSW -graph insndeps.dot foo

, thus producing an analysis report of the 64-bit binary foo when run on a Haswell processor, and a graph of the instruction dependencies viewable with Graphviz.

The report is printed to standard output (though it may be directed to a file with a -o switch). The report given for the above snippet is:

Intel(R) Architecture Code Analyzer Version - 2.1
Analyzed File - ../../../tests_fma
Binary Format - 64Bit
Architecture  - HSW
Analysis Type - Throughput

Throughput Analysis Report
--------------------------
Block Throughput: 1.55 Cycles       Throughput Bottleneck: FrontEnd, PORT2_AGU, PORT3_AGU

Port Binding In Cycles Per Iteration:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  Port  |  0   -  DV  |  1   |  2   -  D   |  3   -  D   |  4   |  5   |  6   |  7   |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Cycles | 0.5    0.0  | 0.5  | 1.5    1.0  | 1.5    1.0  | 1.0  | 0.0  | 1.0  | 0.0  |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

N - port number or number of cycles resource conflict caused delay, DV - Divider pipe (on port 0)
D - Data fetch pipe (on ports 2 and 3), CP - on a critical path
F - Macro Fusion with the previous instruction occurred
* - instruction micro-ops not bound to a port
^ - Micro Fusion happened
# - ESP Tracking sync uop was issued
@ - SSE instruction followed an AVX256 instruction, dozens of cycles penalty is expected
! - instruction not supported, was not accounted in Analysis

| Num Of |                    Ports pressure in cycles                     |    |
|  Uops  |  0  - DV  |  1  |  2  -  D  |  3  -  D  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |    |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   1    |           |     | 1.0   1.0 |           |     |     |     |     | CP | vmovaps ymm1, ymmword ptr [rdi+rax*1]
|   2    | 0.5       | 0.5 |           | 1.0   1.0 |     |     |     |     | CP | vfmadd231ps ymm1, ymm2, ymmword ptr [rsi+rax*1]
|   2    |           |     | 0.5       | 0.5       | 1.0 |     |     |     | CP | vmovaps ymmword ptr [rdx+rax*1], ymm1
|   1    |           |     |           |           |     |     | 1.0 |     |    | add rax, 0x20
|   0F   |           |     |           |           |     |     |     |     |    | jnz 0xffffffffffffffec
Total Num Of Uops: 6

The tool helpfully points out that currently, the bottleneck is the Haswell frontend and Port 2 and 3’s AGU. This example allows us to diagnose the problem as the store not being processed by Port 7, and take remedial action.

Limitations:

IACA does not support a certain few instructions, which are ignored in the analysis. It does not support processors older than Nehalem and does not support non-innermost loops in throughput mode (having no ability to guess which branch is taken how often and in what pattern).

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