Runtime behavior analysis for pointer-intensive applications

Abstract

Despite continued advances in cache design and development of new hardware prefetching techniques, the system performance is limited duo to the irregularity of memory access behavior in pointer-intensive applications. Our work investigates runtime behavior of memory system and CPU CLOCK consumption for pointer-intensive applications. This paper provides experimental results on the Intel Quad multiprocessor for several pointer-intensive applications. The experimental results indicate that the memory behavior in these pointer-intensive applications expose unstable state during the process of their execution, and some pointer-chasing applications display phase change in their memory access and bus consumption. Through further analysis, we found that programming systems must overcome two fundamental limitations of modem memory hierarchies: limited transfer bandwidth and long data access latencies, to achieve high performance on pointer-intensive applications.