Improving Memory Hierarchy Performance for Irregular Applications

Abstract

The gap between CPU speed and memory speed in modern computer systems is widening as new generations of hardware are introduced. Loop blocking and prefetching transformations help bridge this gap for regular applications; however, these techniques don't deal well with irregular applications. This paper investigates using data and computation reordering strategies to improve memory hierarchy utilization for irregular applications on systems with multi-level memory hierarchies. We introduce multi-level blocking as a new computation reordering strategy and present novel integrations of computation and data reordering using space-filling curves. In experiments that applied a combination of data and computation reorderings to two irregular programs, overall execution time dropped by about a factor of two.