Identifying and Exploiting Spatial Regularity in Data Memory References

The growing processor/memory performance gap causes the performance of many codes to be limited by memory accesses. If known to exist in an application, strided memory accesses forming streams can be targeted by optimizations such as prefetching, relocation, remapping, and vector loads. Undetected, they can be a significant source of memory stalls in loops. Existing stream-detection mechanisms either require special hardware, which may not gather statistics for subsequent analysis, or are limited to compile-time detection of array accesses in loops. Formally, little treatment has been accorded to the subject; the concept of locality fails to capture the existence of streams in a program’s memory accesses. The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we define spatial regularity as a means to discuss the presence and effects of streams. Second, we develop measures to quantify spatial regularity, and we design and implement an on-line, parallel algorithm to detect streams ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SC
• Authors: Tushar Mohan, Bronis R. de Supinski, Sally A. McKee, Frank Mueller, Andy Yoo, Martin Schulz
• Keywords: Accesses Forming Streams, Applied Computing, Memory Accesses, SC 2003, Spatial Regularity