Path-Analytic Distributed Object Prefetching

This paper presents our studies on the connectivity between objects and traversal behavior over the access paths among objects in order to devise profitable prefetching policies for object-based distributed systems. We propose a profiling strategy that can classify classes and fields into a handful of generic types exhibiting distinctive and exploitable access patterns during the runtime. Based on the classifications, we propose an improved algorithm of object prefetching to select best candidates to prefetch under practical message size limits. We implement the methodology into our JESSICA2 distributed Java virtual machine and evaluate its effectiveness. Our experimental results show that our prefetching policies are able to eliminate over 93% cache coherence protocol messages and halve the execution time for fine-grained applications.