Data-driven spatial locality
Svetozar Miučin, Alexandra Fedorova · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems · 2018
Researchers and practitioners dedicate a lot of effort to improving spatial locality in their programs. Hardware caches rely on spatial locality for efficient operation; when it is absent, they waste memory bandwidth and cache space by fetching data that is never used before it is evicted. Improving spatial locality is difficult. For the most part, these are manual efforts by expert programmers, requiring substantial insight into the program's data layout and data access pattern.