Advanced cache optimizations -

overview

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

Why More on Memory Hierarchy?

100,000

10,000
Performance

1,000
Processor Processor-Memory
100 Performance Gap
Growing
10
Memory

1
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
Year

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 Review: 6 Basic Cache Optimizations
• Reducing hit time
1. Giving Reads Priority over Writes
• E.g., Read complete before earlier writes in write buffer
2. Avoiding Address Translation during Cache
Indexing

• Reducing Miss Penalty

3. Multilevel Caches

• Reducing Miss Rate

4. Larger Block size (Compulsory misses)
5. Larger Cache size (Capacity misses)
6. Higher Associativity (Conflict misses)
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

11 Advanced Cache Optimizations

• Reducing hit time • Reducing Miss Penalty
1. Small and simple 7. Critical word first
caches 8. Merging write buffers
2. Way prediction
3. Trace caches • Reducing Miss Rate
9. Compiler optimizations
• Increasing cache
bandwidth
• Reducing miss penalty
4. Pipelined caches or miss rate via
5. Multibanked caches parallelism
6. Nonblocking caches 10.Hardware prefetching
11.Compiler prefetching
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 1. Fast Hit times via
Small and Simple Caches
• Index tag memory and then compare takes time
• ⇒ Small cache can help hit time since smaller memory
takes less time to index
– Also L2 cache small enough to fit on chip with the processor avoids
time penalty of going off chip
• Simple ⇒ direct mapping

2.50
Access time (ns)

2.00 1-way 2-way 4-way 8-way

1.50

1.00
0.50
-
16 KB 32 KB 64 KB 128 KB 256 KB 512 KB 1 MB
Cache size

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

2. Fast Hit times via Way Prediction

• The idea: combine fast hit time of Direct Mapped and

have the lower conflict misses of 2-way SA cache
• Way prediction: keep extra bits in cache to predict the
“way,” or block within the set, of next cache access.
– Miss ⇒ 1st check other blocks for matches in next clock cycle
Hit Time

Way-Miss Hit Time Miss Penalty

• Accuracy can be as high as 85%

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 3. Fast Hit times via Trace Cache
(Pentium 4)
• P4 translated X86 to “RISC” micro-ops
1. Dynamic traces of the executed instructions vs. static sequences
of instructions as determined by layout in memory
– Built-in branch predictor
2. Cache the micro-ops vs. x86 instructions
– Decode/translate from x86 to micro-ops on trace cache miss
- Problems:
- complicated address mapping since addresses no longer aligned to
power-of-2 multiples of word size
- instructions may appear multiple times in multiple dynamic traces due
to different branch outcomes

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

4: Increasing Cache Bandwidth by

Pipelining
• Pipeline cache access to maintain bandwidth, but
higher latency
• Instruction cache access pipeline stages:
1: Pentium
2: Pentium Pro through Pentium III
4: Pentium 4
- ⇒ greater penalty on mispredicted branches
- ⇒ more clock cycles between the issue of the load
and the use of the data

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
5. Increasing Cache Bandwidth:
Non-Blocking Caches

• For Out-of-order execution, the processor need not

stall on a cache miss. “hit under miss” reduces the
effective miss penalty by working during miss vs.
ignoring CPU requests
• Non-blocking cache or lockup-free cache allow data
cache to continue to supply cache hits during a miss
– requires multi-bank memories

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

6: Increasing Cache Bandwidth via

Multiple Banks
• Rather than treat the cache as a single monolithic
block, divide into independent banks that can support
simultaneous accesses
• Banking works best when accesses naturally spread
themselves across banks ⇒ mapping of addresses to
banks affects behavior of memory system
• Simple mapping that works well is “sequential
interleaving”
– Spread block addresses sequentially across banks
– E,g, if there 4 banks, Bank 0 has all blocks whose address modulo 4
is 0; bank 1 has all blocks whose address modulo 4 is 1; …

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 7. Reduce Miss Penalty:
Early Restart and Critical Word First
• Don’t wait for full block before restarting CPU
• Early restart—As soon as the requested word of the
block arrives, send it to the CPU and let the CPU
continue execution
• Critical Word First—Request the missed word first
from memory and send it to the CPU as soon as it
arrives; let the CPU continue execution while filling
the rest of the words in the block
– Long blocks more popular today ⇒ Critical Word 1st Widely used

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

8. Merging Write Buffer to

Reduce Miss Penalty
• Write buffer to allow processor to continue
while waiting to write to memory
• When a new entry is loaded in the buffer, its
address is checked against the other blocks in
the buffer
• If there’s a match, blocks are combined

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 9. Reducing Misses by Compiler
Optimizations
• McFarling [1989] reduced caches misses by 75%
on 8KB direct mapped cache, 4 byte blocks in software
• Instructions
– Reorder procedures in memory so as to reduce conflict misses
– Profiling to look at conflicts(using tools they developed)
• Data
– Merging Arrays: improve spatial locality by single array of compound
elements vs. 2 arrays
– Loop Interchange: change nesting of loops to access data in order
stored in memory
– Loop Fusion: Combine 2 independent loops that have same looping
and some variables overlap
– Blocking: Improve temporal locality by accessing “blocks” of data
repeatedly vs. going down whole columns or rows

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

Merging Arrays Example

/* Before: 2 sequential arrays */

int val[SIZE];
int key[SIZE];

/* After: 1 array of stuctures */

struct merge {
int val;
int key;
};
struct merge merged_array[SIZE];

Reducing conflicts between val & key;

improve spatial locality
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 Loop Interchange Example

/* Before */
for (k = 0; k < 100; k = k+1)
for (j = 0; j < 100; j = j+1)
for (i = 0; i < 5000; i = i+1)
x[i][j] = 2 * x[i][j];
/* After */
for (k = 0; k < 100; k = k+1)
for (i = 0; i < 5000; i = i+1)
for (j = 0; j < 100; j = j+1)
x[i][j] = 2 * x[i][j];

Sequential accesses instead of striding

through memory every 100 words; improved
spatial locality
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

Loop Fusion Example

/* Before */
for (i = 0; i < N; i = i+1)
for (j = 0; j < N; j = j+1)
a[i][j] = 1/b[i][j] * c[i][j];
for (i = 0; i < N; i = i+1)
for (j = 0; j < N; j = j+1)
d[i][j] = a[i][j] + c[i][j];
/* After */
for (i = 0; i < N; i = i+1)
for (j = 0; j < N; j = j+1)
{ a[i][j] = 1/b[i][j] * c[i][j];
d[i][j] = a[i][j] + c[i][j];}

2 misses per access to a & c vs. one miss per access;

improve spatial locality
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 Blocking Example
/* Before */
for (i = 0; i < N; i = i+1)
for (j = 0; j < N; j = j+1)
{r = 0;
for (k = 0; k < N; k = k+1){
r = r + y[i][k]*z[k][j];};
x[i][j] = r;
};
• Two Inner Loops:
– Read all NxN elements of z[]
– Read N elements of 1 row of y[] repeatedly
– Write N elements of 1 row of x[]
• Capacity Misses a function of N & Cache Size:
– 2N3 + N2 => (assuming no conflict; otherwise …)
• Idea: compute on BxB submatrix that fits
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

10. Reducing Misses by Hardware

Prefetching of Instructions & Data
• Prefetching relies on having extra memory bandwidth that can
be used without penalty
• Instruction Prefetching
– Typically, CPU fetches 2 blocks on a miss: the requested block and the
next consecutive block.
– Requested block is placed in instruction cache when it returns, and
prefetched block is placed into instruction stream buffer

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 11. Reducing Misses by
Software Prefetching Data

• Data Prefetch
– Load data into register (HP PA-RISC loads)
– Cache Prefetch: load into cache
(MIPS IV, PowerPC, SPARC v. 9)
– Special prefetching instructions cannot cause faults;
a form of speculative execution

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

Compiler Optimization vs. Memory

Hierarchy Search
• Compiler tries to figure out memory hierarchy
optimizations
• New approach: “Auto-tuners” 1st run variations of
program on computer to find best combinations of
optimizations (blocking, padding, …) and algorithms,
then produce C code to be compiled for that
computer
• “Auto-tuner” targeted to numerical method
– E.g., PHiPAC (BLAS), Atlas (BLAS),
Sparsity (Sparse linear algebra), Spiral (DSP), FFT-W

Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey

(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 Sparse Matrix – Search for Blocking
for finite element problem [Im, Yelick, Vuduc, 2005]
Mflop/s

Best: 4x2

Reference Mflop/s
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)

Best Sparse Blocking for 8 Computers

Sun Ultra 2,
Intel
Sun Ultra 3,
8 Pentium M
AMD Opteron
row block size (r)

IBM Power 4, Intel/HP IBM

Intel/HP Itanium Itanium 2 Power 3
4

2
1
1 2 4 8
column block size (c)
• All possible column block sizes selected for 8 computers; How could
compiler know?
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs)
 Mi
ss
Hit Band- Miss HW cost/
Technique Time width
pe
rate complexity Comment
nal
ty

Small and simple caches

+ – 0 Trivial; widely used

Way-predicting caches
+ 1 Used in Pentium 4

Trace caches
+ 3 Used in Pentium 4

Pipelined cache access

– + 1 Widely used

Nonblocking caches
+ + 3 Widely used
Used in L2 of Opteron and
Banked caches
+ 1 Niagara
Critical word first and early
restart + 2 Widely used
Widely used with write
Merging write buffer
+ 1 through
Software is a challenge;
Compiler techniques to reduce
some computers have
cache misses
+ 0 compiler option
Many prefetch instructions;
Hardware prefetching of
2 instr., 3 AMD Opteron prefetches
instructions and data
+ + data data
Adapted from Patterson and Hennessey
Compiler-controlled
(Morgan Kauffman Pubs) Needs nonblocking cache; in
prefetching + + 3 many CPUs