MIST: an algorithm for memory miss traffic management

Cache misses represent a major bottleneck in embedded systems performance. Traditionally, compilers optimistically treated all memory accesses as cache hits, relying on the memory controller to account for longer miss delays. However, the memory controller has only a local view of the program, and is not able to efficiently hide the latency of these memory operations. Our compiler technique actively manages cache misses, and performs global miss traffic optimizations, to better hide the latency of the memory operations. Our memory-aware compiler scheduled several benchmarks on the TIC6211 processor architecture with a direct mapped cache, and generated an average of 61.6% improvement over the best schedule of the traditional (memory-transparent) optimizing compiler, demonstrating the utility of our miss traffic optimization approach.