HyperLink   Run-time adaptive cache hierarchy management via reference analysis
Paper of IMPACT - Cited Greater than 200 Times
   
Publication Year:
  1997
Authors
  Teresa L. Johnson, Wen-mei Hwu
   
Published:
  Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, ISCA 1997
   
Abstract:

Improvements in main memory speeds have not kept pace with increasing processor clock frequency and improved exploitation of instruction-level parallelism. Consequently, the gap between processor and main memory performance is expected to grow, increasing the number of execution cycles spent waiting for memory accesses to complete. One solution to this growing problem is to reduce the number of cache misses by increasing the effectiveness of the cache hierarchy. In this paper we present a technique for dynamic analysis of program data access behavior, which is then used to proactively guide the placement of data within the cache hierarchy in a location-sensitive manner. We introduce the concept of a macroblock, which allows us to feasibly characterize the memory locations accessed by a program, and a Memory Address Table, which performs the dynamic reference analysis. Our technique is fully compatible with existing Instruction Set Architectures. Results from detailed simulations of several integer programs show significant speedups.