Load Instruction Characterization and Acceleration of the BioPerf Programs

Abstract

The load instructions of some of the bioinformatics applications in the BioPerf suite possess interesting characteristics: only a few static loads cover almost the entire dynamic load execution and they almost always hit in the data cache. Nevertheless, these load instructions represent a major performance bottleneck. They often precede or follow branches that are hard to predict, which makes their L1 hit latency difficult to hide even in dynamically scheduled execution cores. This paper investigates this behavior and suggests simple source-code transformations to improve the performance of these benchmark programs by up to 92%