Title
Adaptive prefetching for shared cache based chip multiprocessors
Abstract
Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) present a unique scenario for software data prefetching with subtle tradeoffs between memory bandwidth and performance. In a shared L2 based CMP, multiple cores compete for the shared on-chip cache space and limited off-chip pin bandwidth. Purely software based prefetching techniques tend to increase this contention, leading to degradation in performance. In some cases, prefetches can become harmful by kicking out useful data from the shared cache whose next usage is earlier than the prefetched data, and the fraction of such harmful prefetches usually increases when we increase the number of cores used for executing a multi-threaded application code. In this paper, we propose two complementary techniques to address the problem of harmful prefetches in the context of shared L2 based CMPs. These techniques, namely, suppressing select data prefetches (if they are found to be harmful) and pinning select data in the L2 cache (if they are found to be frequent victim of harmful prefetches), are evaluated in this paper using two embedded application codes. Our experiments demonstrate that these two techniques are very effective in mitigating the impact of harmful prefetches, and as a result, we extract significant benefits from software prefetching even with large core counts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/DATE.2009.5090768
Nice
Keywords
Field
DocType
cache storage,multi-threading,multiprocessing systems,storage management,complementary techniques,embedded application codes,multithreaded application code,off-chip pin bandwidth,on-chip cache space,shared cache based chip multiprocessors,software based prefetching techniques,software data prefetching
Multithreading,System on a chip,Memory bandwidth,Shared memory,Cache,Computer science,CPU cache,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Application software,Cache coherence,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1530-1591
978-1-4244-3781-8
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.44
25
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mahmut T. Kandemir17371568.54
Yuanrui Zhang218015.48
ozcan ozturk319117.42