BulletTime: Time Dilation for High-Fidelity Tracing

Abstract

High-fidelity program tracing incurs frequent I/O that can delay application threads unevenly and reorder application and system operations relative to untraced execution, contaminating simulation and profiling results. This work formalizes the behavior under study and derives correctness requirements for traced execution in the presence of tracing delays. BulletTime implements a time-dilation approach atop Intel Pin that strategically slows application and system threads while meeting those requirements. In memory-contiguity and synchronization studies, existing tracing approaches change application behavior by as much as 20 times, while BulletTime keeps deviations below 10 percent even under extreme asymmetric delays.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{bullettime,
  author = {Wu, Michael and Isaacman, Sibren and Bhattacharjee, Abhishek and Khandelwal, Anurag},
  title = {{BulletTime: Time Dilation for High-Fidelity Tracing}},
  year = {2026},
  month = jun,
  booktitle = {ACM ISCA}
}