Hardware prefetching in bus-based multiprocessors: pattern characterization and cost-effective hardware

Data prefetching has been widely studied as a technique to hide memory access latency in multiprocessors. Most recent research on hardware prefetching focuses either on uniprocessors, or on distributed shared memory (DSM) and other non bus-based organizations. However, in the context of bus-based SMPs, prefetching poses a number of problems related to the lack of scalability and limited bus bandwidth of these modest-sized machines. This paper considers how the number of processors and the memory access patterns in the program influence the relative performance of sequential and non-sequential prefetching mechanisms in a bus-based SMP. We compare the performance of four inexpensive hardware prefetching techniques, varying the number of processors. After a breakdown of the results based on a performance model, we propose a cost-effective hardware prefetching solution for implementing on such modest-sized multiprocessors.