Computationally intensive applications, such as OpenCV, can be off-loaded to accelerators to reduce execution time. However, developing an accelerated system requires a significant amount of time, requiring the developer to first choose an accelerator and which parts to off-load, then to port and the offloaded kernels to the accelerator using many accelerator-specific tools. In addition to the low-level parallelism of the accelerator, the developer also needs to extract and utilize system-level parallelism found within the application, while making sure that the application still executes correctly. This paper presents Courier, a toolchain and a domain specific language for Runtime Binary Acceleration, designed to simplify many of the steps involved in accelerating an application. The Courier toolchain can extract dataflow from a running software binary file, explore the off-loaded execution time on an accelerator, and then actually accelerate the original binary. By utilizing Courier, both expert and non-expert users can easily extract system-level parallelism and decide which part should be off-loaded to accelerators in a mixed software-hardware environment, without special knowledge on the target application source code and accelerator architecture. In a case study an OpenCV application is accelerated by 2.06 times using Courier, without requiring the application source code or any re-compilation of the application.
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