To copy or not to copy

Abstract

To reduce conflict misses, this technique, the data layout in a cache is adjusted by copying array files into temporary arrays that exhibit better cache behavior. This approach incurs a cost proportional to the amount of data being copied. To date, there has been no discussion regarding either this tradeoff or the problem of determining what and when to copy. The authors present a compile-time technique for making this determination and present a selective copying strategy based on this methodology. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate that, because of the sensitivity of cache conflicts to small changes in problem size and base addresses, selective copying can lead to better overall performance than either no copying, complete copying, or copying based on manually applied heuristics.