Abstract

Software-controlled data prefetching offers the potential for bridging the ever-increasing speed gap between the memory subsystem and today's high-performance processors. While prefetching has enjoyed considerable success in array-based numeric codes, its potential in pointer-based applications has remained largely unexplored. This paper investigates compilerbased prefetching for pointer-based applications---in particular, those containing recursive data structures. We identify the fundamental problem in prefetching pointer-based data structures and propose a guideline for devising successful prefetching schemes. Based on this guideline, we design three prefetching schemes, we automate the most widely applicable scheme (greedy prefetching) in an optimizing research compiler, and we evaluate the performance of all three schemes on a modern superscalar processor similar to the MIPS R10000. Our results demonstrate that compiler-inserted prefetching can significantly improve the execution...

Citations