TexasScholarWorks
    • Login
    • Submit
    View Item 
    •   Repository Home
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    • Repository Home
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Prefetch mechanisms by application memory access pattern

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    agaramk99791.pdf (1.595Mb)
    Date
    2007-05
    Author
    Agaram, Kartik Kandadai
    Share
     Facebook
     Twitter
     LinkedIn
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Modern computer systems spend a substantial fraction of their running time waiting for data from memory. While prefetching has been a promising avenue of research for reducing and tolerating latencies to memory, it has also been a challenge to implement. This challenge exists largely because of the growing complexity of memory hierarchies and the wide variety of application behaviors. In this dissertation we propose a new methodology that emphasizes decomposing complex behavior at the application level into regular components that are intelligible at a high level to the architect. This dissertation is divided into three stages. In the first, we build tools to help decompose application behavior by data structure and phase, and use these tools to create a richer picture of application behavior than with conventional simulation tools, yielding compressed summaries of dominant access patterns. The variety of a access patterns drives the next stage: design of a prefetch system that improves on the state of the art. Every prefetching system must make low-overhead decisions on what to prefetch, when to prefetch it, and where to store prefetched data. Visualizing application a access patterns allows us to articulate the subtleties in making these decisions and the many ways that a mechanism that improves one decision for one set of applications may degrade the quality of another decision for a different set. Our insights lead us to a new system called TwoStep with a small set of independent but synergistic mechanisms. In the third stage we perform a detailed evaluation of TwoStep. We find that while it outperforms past approaches for the most irregular applications in our benchmark suite, it is unable to improve on the speedups for more regular applications. Understanding why leads to an improved understanding of two general categories of prefetch techniques. Prefetching an either look back at past history or look forward by precomputing an application's future requirements. Applications with a low compute-a ccess ratio an benefit from history-based prefetching if their access pattern is not too irregular. Applications with irregular access patterns may benefit from precomputation-based prefetching, as long as their compute-access ratio is not too low.
    Department
    Computer Sciences
    Description
    text
    Subject
    Cache memory
    Memory management (Computer science)
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/2152/13140
    Collections
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin

     

     

    Browse

    Entire RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentsThis CollectionDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartments

    My Account

    Login

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Information

    About Contact Policies Getting Started Glossary Help FAQs

    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin