HyperLink   Run-time Spatial Locality Detection and Optimization.
Paper of IMPACT - Cited Greater than 100 Times
   
Publication Year:
  1997
Authors
  Teresa L. Johnson, Matthew C. Merten, Wen-mei Hwu
   
Published:
  Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Microarchitecture, December 1-3, 1997
   
Abstract:

As the disparity between processor and main memory performance grows, he number of execution cycles spent waiting for memory accessed to complete also increases. As a result, latency hiding techniques are critical for improved application performance on future processors. We present a microarchitecture scheme which detects and adapts to varying spatial locality, dynamically adjusting the amount of data fetched on a cache miss. The Spatial Locality Detection Table, introduced in this paper, facilitates the detection of spatial locality across adjacent cached blocks. Results from detailed simulations of several integer programs show significant speedups. The improvements are due to the reduction of conflict misses and capacity missed by utilizing small blocks and small fetch sizes when spatial locality is absent, and the prefetching effect of large fetch sizes when spatial locality exists.