Report Number: CSL-TR-94-639
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Two Case Studies in Latency Tolerant Architectures
Author: Bennett, James E.
Author: Flynn, Michael J.
Date: October 1994
Abstract: Researchers have proposed a variety of techniques for dealing with memory latency, such as dynamic scheduling, hardware prefetching, software prefetching, and multiple contexts. This paper presents the results of two case studies on the usefulness of some simple techniques for latency tolerance. These techniques are nonblocking caches, reordering of loads and stores, and basic block scheduling for the expected latency of loads. The effectiveness of these techniques was found to vary according to the type of application. While nonblocking caches and load/store reordering consistently improved performance, scheduling based on expected latency was found to decrease performance in most cases. This result shows that the assumption of a uniform miss rate used by the scheduler is incorrect, and suggests that techniques for estimating the miss rates of individual loads are needed. These results were obtained using a new simulation environment, MXS, currently under development.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/94/639/CSL-TR-94-639.pdf