Multiple stream tracker
Taesu Kim, Dali Zhao, Alexander V. Veidenbaum · 2014
Data prefetching is a very important technique for hiding memory latency and improving performance in modern computer processors. Existing techniques are not able to find all or best data streams to prefetch. This paper proposes a new prefetching technique, Multiple Stream Tracker (MST), that improves over state-of-the-art by identifying strided accesses in a cache miss stream. Targeting the lower levels of cache it searches for the best among all possible strided streams to prefetch. A technique to efficiently search and rank multiple strided streams is proposed. The proposed technique can identify streams that subsume streams generated by both delta correlated and standard stride prefetchers. The MST pefetcher can also significantly improve performance in parallel programs.