A Reactive Unobtrusive Prefetcher for Multicore and Manycore Architectures

Processor performance continues to out pace memory performance by a large margin. The growing popularity of multi-core and many-core architectures further exacerbates this problem. The challenge of keeping the processor(s) fed with data becomes more difficult. One approach for mitigating this gap is to employ software-based speculative prefetching. Software dynamic prefetchers are able to identify more complex patterns than hardware prefetchers, while retaining the ability to respond to dynamic program behavior. However, modern techniques incur prohibitively high application overheads to detect and to exploit these data access patterns, and do little to accommodate multi-core and many-core architectures.