Reducing Cache Pollution of Threaded Prefetching by Controlling Prefetch Distance

Abstract

Threaded prefetching based on Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) issues memory requests for data needed later by the main computation, and therefore may lead to increased stress on limited shared cache space and bus bandwidth. In our earlier work, we had proposed an effective threaded prefetching technique that selects proper prefetch distance for specific application to improve the timeliness of prefetching. In this paper, we first estimate the upper limit of prefetch distance for specific application in our proposed threaded prefetching technique, and then analyze the effect of increasing prefetch distance on shared cache pollution. Our experimental evaluations indicated that the bounded range of effective prefetch distance can be determined using our method, and the shared cache pollution can be reduced by controlling prefetch distance in our proposed threaded prefetching technique.