Effects of Prefetching of Objects on Execution Time for Object-Oriented Fortran Programs
Donna S. Reese, Greg Henley · 1994
The primary objective of this project was to determine the effect that transparent prefetching of data from disk has on the execution time of large dataspace applications. The applications of interest in this project had been decomposed for parallel execution using the Object-Oriented Fortran (OOF) programming environment. For this project, data usage patterns were predicted from the information already present in the applications from their decomposition into objects. The kernel of the OOF environment was modified to support fetching of the second object from its scheduling queue concurrently with the execution of the first object on the queue. These experiments were run under SunOS on both SPARCstation 2''s and SPARCstation 10''s. The results of these experiments showed no improvement over execution of the same program without data prefetching because of architectural constraints in the processors as well as constraints of the operating system in specifying data movements between the disk and main memory levels of the memory hierarchy. Further simulation of alternative architectures and operating systems without these constraints is recommended.