Resource-Aware Compiler Prefetching for Fine-Grained Many-Cores

Super-scalar, out-of-order processors that can have tens of read and write requests in the execution window place significant demands on Memory Level Parallelism (MLP). Multi- and many-cores with shared parallel caches further increase MLP demand. Current cache hierarchies however have been unable to keep up with this trend, with modern designs allowing only 4–16 concurrent cache misses. This disconnect is exacerbated by recent highly parallel architectures (e.g. GPUs) where power and area per-core budget favor numerous lighter cores with less resources, further reducing support for MLP on a per-core basis. Support for hardware and software prefetch increases MLP pressure since these techniques overlap multiple memory requests with existing computation. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel Resource-Aware Prefetching (RAP) compiler algorithm that is aware of the number of simultaneous prefetches supported, and optimized for the same. We implemented our algorithm in a GCC-derived compiler and evaluated its performance using an emerging fine-grained many-core architecture. Our results show that the RAP algorithm outperforms a well-known loop prefetching algorithm by up to 40.15% in run-time on average across benchmarks and the state-of-the art GCC implementation by up to 34.79%, depending upon hardware configuration. Moreover, we compare the RAP algorithm with a simple hardware prefetching mechanism, and show run-time improvements of up to 24.61%. To demonstrate the robustness of our approach, we conduct a design-space exploration (DSE) for the considered target architecture by varying (i) the amount of chip resources designated for per-core prefetch storage and (ii) off-chip bandwidth. We show that the RAP algorithm is robust in that it improves performance across all design points considered. We also identify the Pareto-optimal hardware-software configuration which delivers 53.66% run-time improvement on average while using only 5.47% more chip area than the bare-bones design.