About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
MICRO 2015
Conference paper
Self-contained, accurate precomputation prefetching
Abstract
This work revisits precomputation prefetching targeting long access latency loads with access patterns that are hard to predict. It presents Ekivolos, a precomputation prefetcher system that automatically builds prefetching slices that contain enough control flow instructions to faithfully and autonomously recreate the program's access behavior without inducing monitoring and execution overhead on the main thread. Ekivolos departs from the traditional notion of creating optimized short slices. In contrast, it shows that even longer slices can run ahead of the main thread and perform useful prefetches as long as they are sufficiently accurate. Ekivolos operates on arbitrary application binaries and takes advantage of the observed execution paths in creating its slices. On a set of emerging workloads Ekivolos outperforms three state-of-the-art hardware prefetchers and previously proposed precomputation-based prefetchers.