Summary: Comparing and Combining
Read Miss Clustering and Software Prefetching \Lambda
Vijay S. Pai y and Sarita V. Adve z
y Electrical and Computer Engineering z Computer Science
Rice University University of Illinois
Houston, TX 77005 Urbana­Champaign, IL 61801
vijaypai@rice.edu sadve@cs.uiuc.edu
Abstract
A recent latency tolerance technique, read miss clus­
tering, restructures code to send demand miss references
in parallel to the underlying memory system. An alter­
nate, widely­used latency tolerance technique is software
prefetching, which initiates data fetches ahead of expected
demand miss references by a certain distance. Since both
techniques seem to target the same types of latencies and
use the same system resources, it is unclear which technique
is superior or if both can be combined. This paper shows
that these two techniques are actually mutually beneficial,
each helping to overcome limitations of the other.
We perform our study for uniprocessor and multiproces­

Source: Adve, Sarita - Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences