Temporal Streaming of Shared Memory

• Main Authors: Wenisch, Thomas F., Somogyi, Stephen, Hardavellas, Nikolaos, Kim, Jangwoo, Ailamaki, Anastassia, Falsafi, Babak
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures > Multiple instruction, multiple data; Computing methodologies > Modeling and simulation > Model development and analysis > Modeling methodologies; Delay; Fabrication; General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Performance; Hardware; Hardware > Integrated circuits; Hardware > Integrated circuits > Semiconductor memory; Laboratories; Microarchitecture; Prefetching; Proposals; Web server
• ISSN: 1063-6897; 2575-713X
• DOI: 10.1109/ISCA.2005.50

Coherent read misses in shared-memory multiprocessors account for a substantial fraction of execution time in many important scientific and commercial workloads. We propose Temporal Streaming, to eliminate coherent read misses by streaming data to a processor in advance of the corresponding memory accesses. Temporal streaming dynamically identifies address sequences to be streamed by exploiting two common phenomena in shared-memory access patterns: (1) temporal address correlation - groups of shared addresses tend to be accessed together and in the same order, and (2) temporal stream locality - recently-accessed address streams are likely to recur. We present a practical design for temporal streaming. We evaluate our design using a combination of trace-driven and cycle-accurate full-system simulation of a cache-coherent distributed shared-memory system. We show that temporal streaming can eliminate 98% of coherent read misses in scientific applications, and between 43% and 60% in database and web server workloads. Our design yields speedups of 1.07 to 3.29 in scientific applications, and 1.06 to 1.21 in commercial workloads.