Runtime behavior analysis for pointer-intensive applications

Despite continued advances in cache design and development of new hardware prefetching techniques, the system performance is limited duo to the irregularity of memory access behavior in pointer-intensive applications. Our work investigates runtime behavior of memory system and CPU CLOCK consumption for pointer-intensive applications. This paper provides experimental results on the Intel Quad multiprocessor for several pointer-intensive applications. The experimental results indicate that the memory behavior in these pointer-intensive applications expose unstable state during the process of their execution, and some pointer-chasing applications display phase change in their memory access and bus consumption. Through further analysis, we found that programming systems must overcome two fundamental limitations of modem memory hierarchies: limited transfer bandwidth and long data access latencies, to achieve high performance on pointer-intensive applications.