Reuse-distance-based miss-rate prediction on a per instruction basis

Abstract

Feedback-directed optimization has become an increasingly important tool in designing and building optimizing compilers. Recently, reuse-distance analysis has shown much promise in predicting the memory behavior of programs over a wide range of data sizes. Reuse-distance analysis predicts program locality by experimentally determining locality properties as a function of the data size of a program, allowing accurate locality analysis when the program's data size changes.Prior work has established the effectiveness of reuse distance analysis in predicting whole-program locality and miss rates. In this paper, we show that reuse distance can also effectively predict locality and miss rates on a per instruction basis. Rather than predict locality by analyzing reuse distances for memory addresses alone, we relate those addresses to particular static memory operations and predict the locality of each instruction.Our experiments show that using reuse distance without cache simulation to predict miss rates of instructions is superior to using cache simulations on a single representative data set to predict miss rates on various data sizes. In addition, our analysis allows us to identify the critical memory operations that are likely to produce a significant number of cache misses for a given data size. With this information, compilers can target cache optimization specifically to the instructions that can benefit from such optimizations most.