Compression in data caches with compressible field isolation for recursive data structures

Abstract

We introduce a software/hardware scheme called the Field Array Compression Technique (FACT) which reduces cache misses due to recursive data structures. Using a data layout transformation, data with temporal affinity is gathered in contiguous memory, where the recursive pointers and integer fields are compressed. As a result, one cache-block can capture a greater amount of data with temporal affinity, especially pointers, improving the prefetching effect of a cache-block. In addition, the compression enlarges the effective cache capacity. On a suite of pointer-intensive programs, FACT achieves a 41.6% reduction in memory stall time and a 37.4% speedup on average. © Springer-Verlag 2003.