Temporal Streaming of Shared Memory

Coherent read misses in shared-memory multiprocessors account for a substantial fraction of execution time in many important scientific and commercial workloads. We propose Temporal Streaming, to eliminate coherent read misses by streaming data to a processor in advance of the corresponding memory accesses. Temporal streaming dynamically identifies address sequences to be streamed by exploiting two common phenomena in shared-memory access patterns: (1) temporal address correlation—groups of shared addresses tend to be accessed together and in the same order, and (2) temporal stream locality—recently-accessed address streams are likely to recur. We present a practical design for temporal streaming. We evaluate our design using a combination of trace-driven and cycle-accurate full-system simulation of a cache-coherent distributed shared-memory system. We show that temporal streaming can eliminate 98% of coherent read misses in scientific applications, and between 43% and 60% in data...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Thomas F. Wenisch, Stephen Somogyi, Nikolaos Hardavellas, Jangwoo Kim, Anastassia Ailamaki, Babak Falsafi
• Keywords: Coherent Read Misses, Hardware, ISCA 2005, Temporal Address Correlation—groups, Temporal Streaming