Runtime Engine for Dynamic Profile Guided Stride Prefetching

Stride prefetching is recognized as an important technique to improve memory access performance. The prior work usually profiles and/or analyzes the program behavior offline, and uses the identified stride patterns to guide the compilation process by injecting the prefetch instructions at appropriate places. There are some researches trying to enable stride prefetching in runtime systems with online profiling, but they either cannot discover cross-procedural prefetch opportunity, or require special supports in hardware or garbage collection. In this paper, we present a prefetch engine for JVM (Java Virtual Machine). It firstly identifies the candidate load operations during just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and then instruments the compiled code to profile the addresses of those loads. The runtime profile is collected in a trace buffer, which triggers a prefetch controller upon a protection fault. The prefetch controller analyzes the trace to discover any stride patterns, then modifies t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JCST
• Authors: Qiong Zou, Xiao-Feng Li, Long-Bing Zhang
• Keywords: JCST 2008, Prefetch Controller, Prefetch Instructions, Stride Patterns