Thread-Aware Adaptive Prefetcher on Multicore Systems

Abstract

Most processors employ hardware data prefetching techniques to hide memory access latencies. However, the prefetching requests from different threads on a multicore processor can cause severe interference with prefetching and/or demand requests of others. The data prefetching can lead to significant performance degradation due to shared resource contention on shared memory multicore systems. This article proposes a thread-aware data prefetching mechanism based on low-overhead runtime information to tune prefetching modes and aggressiveness, mitigating the resource contention in the memory system. Our solution has three new components: (1) a self-tuning prefetcher that uses runtime feedback to dynamically adjust data prefetching modes and arguments of each thread, (2) a filtering mechanism that informs the hardware about which prefetching request can cause shared data invalidation and should be discarded, and (3) a limiter thread acceleration mechanism to estimate and accelerate the critical thread which has the longest completion time in the parallel region of execution. On a set of multithreaded parallel benchmarks, our thread-aware data prefetching mechanism improves the overall performance of 64-core system by 13% over a multimode prefetch baseline system with two-level cache organization and conventional modified, exclusive, shared, and invalid-based directory coherence protocol. We compare our approach with the feedback directed prefetching technique and find that it provides 9% performance improvement on multicore systems, while saving the memory bandwidth consumption.