Article

Value-Profile Guided Stride Prefetching for Irregular Code

Authors:

Mauricio J. Serrano,

Rakesh Krishnaiyer,

Wei Li, and

Jesse FangAuthors Info & Claims

CC '02: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Compiler Construction

April 2002

Pages 307 - 324

Published: 08 April 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Memory operations in irregular code are difficult to prefetch, as the future address of a memory location is hard to anticipate by a compiler. However, recent studies as well as our experience indicate that many irregular programs contain loads with near-constant strides. This paper presents a novel compiler technique to profile and prefetch for those loads. The profile captures not only the dominant stride values for each profiled load, but also the differences between the successive strides of the load. The profile information helps the compiler to classify load instructions into strongly or weakly strided and single-strided or phased multi-strided. The prefetching decisions guided by the load classifications are highly selective and beneficial. We obtain significant performance improvement for the CPU2000 integer programs running on Itanium machines. For example, we achieve a 1.55x speedup for "181.mcf", 1.15x for "254.gap", 1.08x for "197.parser" and smaller gains in other benchmarks. We also show that the performance gain is stable across profile data sets and that the profiling overhead is low. These benefits make the new technique suitable for a production compiler.

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Cited By

Ainsworth SJones TReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Software prefetching for indirect memory accessesProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049865(305-317)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049865
Dash ADemsky BBanavar G(2010)Automatically generating symbolic prefetches for distributed transactional memoriesProceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th International Conference on Middleware10.5555/2023718.2023743(355-375)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2023718.2023743
Adl-Tabatabai AHudson RSerrano MSubramoney S(2004)Prefetch injection based on hardware monitoring and object metadataACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/996893.99687339:6(267-276)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/996893.996873
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cover image Guide Proceedings

CC '02: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Compiler Construction

April 2002

343 pages

ISBN:3540433694

Editor:
R. Nigel Horspool

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 08 April 2002

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Cited By

Ainsworth SJones TReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Software prefetching for indirect memory accessesProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049865(305-317)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049865
Dash ADemsky BBanavar G(2010)Automatically generating symbolic prefetches for distributed transactional memoriesProceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th International Conference on Middleware10.5555/2023718.2023743(355-375)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2023718.2023743
Adl-Tabatabai AHudson RSerrano MSubramoney S(2004)Prefetch injection based on hardware monitoring and object metadataACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/996893.99687339:6(267-276)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/996893.996873
Adl-Tabatabai AHudson RSerrano MSubramoney SPugh WChambers C(2004)Prefetch injection based on hardware monitoring and object metadataProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2004 conference on Programming language design and implementation10.1145/996841.996873(267-276)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/996841.996873
Inagaki TOnodera TKomatsu HNakatani TCytron RGupta R(2003)Stride prefetching by dynamically inspecting objectsProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation10.1145/781131.781161(269-277)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/781131.781161
Inagaki TOnodera TKomatsu HNakatani T(2003)Stride prefetching by dynamically inspecting objectsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/780822.78116138:5(269-277)Online publication date: 9-May-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/780822.781161
Wu Y(2002)Efficient discovery of regular stride patterns in irregular programs and its use in compiler prefetchingACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/543552.51255537:5(210-221)Online publication date: 17-May-2002
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/543552.512555
Luk CMuth RPatil HWeiss RLowney PCohn REbcioglu KPingali KNicolau A(2002)Profile-guided post-link stride prefetchingProceedings of the 16th international conference on Supercomputing10.1145/514191.514217(167-178)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2002
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Wu YKnoop JHendren L(2002)Efficient discovery of regular stride patterns in irregular programs and its use in compiler prefetchingProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 conference on Programming language design and implementation10.1145/512529.512555(210-221)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2002
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