Characterizing and controlling program behavior using execution-time variance

Immersive applications, such as computer gaming, computer vision and video codecs, are an important emerging class of applications with QoS requirements that are difficult to characterize and control using traditional methods. This thesis proposes new techniques reliant on execution-time variance to both characterize and control program behavior. The proposed techniques are intended to be broadly applicable to a wide variety of immersive applications and are intended to be easy for programmers to apply without needing to gain specialized expertise. First, we create new QoS controllers that programmers can easily apply to their applications to achieve desired application-specific QoS objectives on any platform or application data-set, provided the programmers verify that their applications satisfy some simple domain requirements specific to immersive applications. The controllers adjust programmer-identified knobs every application frame to effect desired values for programmer-identified QoS metrics. The control techniques are novel in that they do not require the user to provide any kind of application behavior models, and are effective for immersive applications that defy the traditional requirements for feedback controller construction. Second, we create new profiling techniques that provide visibility into the behavior of a large complex application, inferring behavior relationships across application components based on the execution-time variance observed at all levels of granularity of the application functionality. Additionally for immersive applications, some of the most important QoS requirements relate to managing the execution-time variance of key application components, for example, the frame-rate. The profiling techniques not only identify and summarize behavior directly relevant to the QoS aspects related to timing, but also indirectly reveal non-timing related properties of behavior, such as the identification of components that are sensitive to data, or those whose behavior changes based on the call-context.Ph.D