System and method to instrument references to shared memory

In some embodiments, the invention involves instrumentation of computer binary code and, more specifically, dynamically identifying shared memory accesses at runtime and instrumenting the shared memory access instruction code. Some embodiments use code caching to only hold the patched instrumentation. Other embodiments use code caching to hold the entire program and instrumentation. Shared memory accesses are identified using inaccessible memory address references to cause memory faults. The fault handler may emulate instrumentation in one instance and cause a just-in-time compilation of instruction traces with instrumentation into the code cache. Other embodiments are described and claimed.