Examination of a memory access classification scheme for pointer-intensive and numeric programs

Abstract

In recent work, we have described a data prefetch mechanism for pointer-intensive and numeric computations, and presented detailed measurements on a suite of benchmarks to quanti~its performance potential] [HM94, Meh96]. In this paper we review a simple classification for memory access patterns on which the prefetch mechanism is based, and then take a close look at two codes from our suite. Focusing on just two programs allows us to display a wide range of slmulauon data. Results from this study several additional optimizations for future data prefetch mechanisms,