Profile-Guided Temporal Prefetching

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Mengming, Zhang, Qijun, Gao, Yichuan, Fang, Wenji, Lu, Yao, Ren, Yongqing, Xie, Zhiyao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Mengming
Zhang, Qijun
Gao, Yichuan
Fang, Wenji
Lu, Yao
Ren, Yongqing
Xie, Zhiyao
author_facet Li, Mengming
Zhang, Qijun
Gao, Yichuan
Fang, Wenji
Lu, Yao
Ren, Yongqing
Xie, Zhiyao
contents Temporal prefetching shows promise for handling irregular memory access patterns, which are common in data-dependent and pointer-based data structures. Recent studies introduced on-chip metadata storage to reduce the memory traffic caused by accessing metadata from off-chip DRAM. However, existing prefetching schemes struggle to efficiently utilize the limited on-chip storage. An alternative solution, software indirect access prefetching, remains ineffective for optimizing temporal prefetching. In this work, we propose Prophet--a hardware-software co-designed framework that leverages profile-guided methods to optimize metadata storage management. Prophet profiles programs using counters instead of traces, injects hints into programs to guide metadata storage management, and dynamically tunes these hints to enable the optimized binary to adapt to different program inputs. Prophet is designed to coexist with existing hardware temporal prefetchers, delivering efficient, high-performance solutions for frequently executed workloads while preserving the original runtime scheme for less frequently executed workloads. Prophet outperforms the state-of-the-art temporal prefetcher, Triangel, by 14.23%, effectively addressing complex temporal patterns where prior profile-guided solutions fall short (only achieving 0.1% performance gain). Prophet delivers superior performance across all evaluated workload inputs, introducing negligible profiling, analysis, and instruction overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15985
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Profile-Guided Temporal Prefetching
Li, Mengming
Zhang, Qijun
Gao, Yichuan
Fang, Wenji
Lu, Yao
Ren, Yongqing
Xie, Zhiyao
Hardware Architecture
Temporal prefetching shows promise for handling irregular memory access patterns, which are common in data-dependent and pointer-based data structures. Recent studies introduced on-chip metadata storage to reduce the memory traffic caused by accessing metadata from off-chip DRAM. However, existing prefetching schemes struggle to efficiently utilize the limited on-chip storage. An alternative solution, software indirect access prefetching, remains ineffective for optimizing temporal prefetching. In this work, we propose Prophet--a hardware-software co-designed framework that leverages profile-guided methods to optimize metadata storage management. Prophet profiles programs using counters instead of traces, injects hints into programs to guide metadata storage management, and dynamically tunes these hints to enable the optimized binary to adapt to different program inputs. Prophet is designed to coexist with existing hardware temporal prefetchers, delivering efficient, high-performance solutions for frequently executed workloads while preserving the original runtime scheme for less frequently executed workloads. Prophet outperforms the state-of-the-art temporal prefetcher, Triangel, by 14.23%, effectively addressing complex temporal patterns where prior profile-guided solutions fall short (only achieving 0.1% performance gain). Prophet delivers superior performance across all evaluated workload inputs, introducing negligible profiling, analysis, and instruction overhead.
title Profile-Guided Temporal Prefetching
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15985