Data flow analysis for software prefetching linked data structures in Java

Abstract

Describes an effective compile-time analysis for software prefetching in Java. Previous work in software data prefetching for pointer-based codes asses simple compiler algorithms and does not investigate prefetching for object-oriented language features that male compile-time analysis difficult. We develop a new data flow analysis to detect regular accesses to linked data structures in Java programs. We use intra- and inter-procedural analysis to identify profitable prefetching opportunities for greedy and jump-pointer prefetching, and we implement these techniques in a compiler for Java. Our results show that both prefetching techniques improve four of our ten programs. The largest performance improvement is 48% with jump-pointers, but consistent improvements are difficult to obtain.