Frequent Value Locality and Value-Centric Data Cache Design

By studying the behavior of programs in the SPECint95 suite we observed that six out of eight programs exhibit a new kind of value locality, the frequent value locality, according to which a few values appear very frequently in memory locations and are therefore involved in a large fraction of memory accesses. In these six programs ten distinct values occupy over 50% of all memory locations and on an average account for nearly 50% of all memory accesses during program execution. This observation holds for smaller blocks of consecutive memory locations and the set of frequent values remains quite stable over the execution of the program. In the six benchmarks with frequent value locality, on an average 50% of all cache misses occur during the reading or writing of the ten most frequently accessed values. We propose a new data cache structure, the frequent value cache (FVC), which employs a value-centric approach to caching data locations for exploiting the frequent value locality pheno...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Youtao Zhang, Jun Yang 0002, Rajiv Gupta
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2000, Frequent Value Locality, Frequent Values, Memory Locations, Programming Languages