Constant Distance Prefetching for Linked Data Structure Based on CMP

The memory wall problem is one of the important issues in modern computer system, and it affects the system performance in spite of the powerful processor. The emergence of multi-core processors has further exacerbated the problem. On the other hand, the increasing use of the linked data structure in applications aggravates the memory access latency. This paper utilizes multi-threading technology based on CMP, and dispatches a helper thread when the program is running which prefetches the demanded data into the shared cache in advance to hide the long memory access latency. The helper thread shows great performance by controlling the distance between helper thread and main thread. Simple analysis of the effect of the computation workload between the accesses of the pointers to prefetching is also provided.