Temporal Streams in Commercial Server Applications

Commercial server applications remain memory bound on modern multiprocessor systems because of their large data footprints, frequent sharing, complex non-strided access patterns, and long chains of dependant misses. To improve memory system performance despite these challenging access patterns, researchers have proposed prefetchers that exploit temporal streams - recurring sequences of memory accesses. Although prior studies show substantial performance improvement from such schemes, they fail to explain why temporal streams arise; that is, they treat commercial applications as a black box and do not identify the specific behaviors that lead to recurring miss sequences.