Software Prefetching for Indirect Memory Accesses
Publication Date
2017ISSN
2164-2397
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Pages
305-317
Language
English
Type
Conference Object
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Ainsworth, S., & Jones, T. M. (2017). Software Prefetching for Indirect Memory Accesses. 305-317. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.7154
Abstract
Many modern data processing and HPC workloads are heavily memory-latency bound. A tempting proposition to solve this is software prefetching, where special non-blocking loads are used to bring data into the cache hierarchy just before being required. However, these are difficult to insert to effectively improve performance, and techniques for automatic insertion are currently limited.
This paper develops a novel compiler pass to automatically generate software prefetches for indirect memory accesses, a special class of irregular memory accesses often seen in high-performance workloads. We evaluate this across a wide set of systems, all of which gain benefit from the technique. We then evaluate the extent to which good prefetch instructions are architecture dependent. Across a set of memory-bound benchmarks, our automated pass achieves average speedups of 1.3$\times$ and 1.1$\times$ for an Intel Haswell processor and an ARM Cortex-A57, both out-of-order cores, and performance improvements of 2.1$\times$ and 3.7$\times$ for the in-order ARM Cortex-A53 and Intel Xeon Phi.
Keywords
Software Prefetching, Compiler Analysis
Sponsorship
EPSRC (1510365)
EPSRC (EP/K026399/1)
Identifiers
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.7154
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/261916
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