Abstract

In this paper, trace locality of reference (LoR) is identified as a mechanism to predict the behavior of a variety of systems. If two objects were accessed nearby in the past and the first one is accessed again, trace LoR predicts that the second one will be accessed in near future. To capture trace LoR, trace graph is introduced. Although trace LoR can be observed in a variety of systems, but the focus of this paper is to characterize it for data accesses in memory management systems. In this field, it is compared with recency-based prediction (LRU stack) and it is shown that not only the model is much simpler, but also it outperforms recency-based prediction in all cases. The paper examines various parameters affecting trace LoR such as object size, caching effects (address reference stream versus miss address stream), and access type (read, write, or both). It shows that object size does not have meaningful effects on trace LoR; in average the predictability of miss address stream is 30% better than address reference stream; and identifying access type can increase predictability. Finally, two enhancements are introduced to the model: history and multiple LRU prediction. A main contribution of this paper is the introduction of the n-stride prediction¹. For a prediction to be useful, we should have sufficient time to load the object, and n-stride prediction shows that trace LoR can predict an access far ahead from its occurrence.

Keywords: Performance evaluation; Memory hierarchy; Locality of reference; Data prefetching

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. Trace locality of reference

4. The basic model: trace graph

4.1. Definition

4.2. Analysis

5. Experiments

6. Enhancing the model

7. n-Stride prediction

8. Conclusion

References

Vitae