Coterminous locality and coterminous group data prefetching on chip-multiprocessors

Due to shared cache contentions and interconnect delays, data prefetching is more critical in alleviating penalties from increasing memory latencies and demands on chip-multiprocessors (CMPs). Through deep analysis of SPEC2000 applications, we find that a part of the nearby data memory references often exhibit highly-repeated patterns with long, but equal block reuse distance. These references can form a coterminous group (CG). Coterminous locality is introduced as that when a member in a CG is referenced, the remaining members will likely be referenced in the near future. Based on the coterminous locality behavior, we implement a novel CG data prefetcher on CMPs. Performance evaluations show that the proposed prefetcher can accurately cover up to 40-50% of the total misses, and result in 50-60% of potential performance improvement for several selected workload mixes.