Title :
Pursuing the performance potential of dynamic cache line sizes
Author :
Van, Peter ; Anderson, Vleet Eric ; Brown, Lindsay ; Baer, Jean-Loup ; Karlin, Anna
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Washington Univ., Seattle, WA, USA
Abstract :
We examine the application of offline algorithms for determining the optical sequence of loads and superloads (a load of multiple consecutive cache lines) for direct-mapped caches. We evaluate potential gains in terms of miss rate and bandwidth and find that in many cases optimal superloading can noticeably reduce the miss rate without appreciably increasing bandwidth. Then we examine how this performance potential might be realized. We examine the effectiveness of a dynamic online algorithm and of static analysis (profiling) for superloading and compare these to next-line prefetching. Experimental results show improvements comparable to those of the optimal algorithm in terms of miss rates
Keywords :
cache storage; program diagnostics; software performance evaluation; bandwidth; direct-mapped cache; dynamic cache line sizes; dynamic online algorithm; experimental results; loads; miss rate; next-line prefetching; offline algorithms; optical sequence; performance; static analysis; superloads; Algorithm design and analysis; Application software; Bandwidth; Computer science; Costs; Delay; Hardware; Heuristic algorithms; Prefetching; Size control;
Conference_Titel :
Computer Design, 1999. (ICCD '99) International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Austin, TX
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0406-X
DOI :
10.1109/ICCD.1999.808592