HyperLink   Characterization of Repeating Data Access Patterns in Integer Benchmarks.
   
Publication Year:
  2001
Authors
  Erik M. Nystrom, Roy Dz-ching Ju, Wen-mei Hwu
   
Published:
  Memory Performance Issues Workshop at the 28th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, July 2001
   
Abstract:

Processor speeds continue to outpace the memory subsystem making it neccesary to proactively acquire and retain important data. Current applications have an ever increasing number of dynamically allocated data structures and these data structures occupy large footprints. A large portion of dynamically allocated data is accessed through pointers in the form of recursive data structures. Loads accessing these data structures often become a data cache bottleneck because they depend on a previous instance of themselves, scattering their accesses. For this reason, optimization techniques specific to these types of loads should be employed. One technique is to analyze the data stream and use the resulting information to guide prefetching and/or dynamic data layout. This work characterizes the repeating data access patterns in both the Olden and SPEC CPU2000I benchmark suites. The intent is to apply the analysis result to guide later optimizations. 

In this paper, we discuss our findings, with some benchmarks show interesting correlation in their data accesses. We have also obtained indication that such correlation manifests itself more prominently when a program's execution is divided into phases. A preliminary attempt was also performed in which analysis results were used to guide data prefetching.