Efficient prefetching with hybrid schemes and use of program feedback to adjust prefetcher aggressiveness

A set of hybrid and adaptive prefetching schemes are considered in this paper. The prefetchers are hybrid in that they use combinations of Stride, Sequential and C/DC prefetching mechanisms. The schemes are adaptive in that their aggressiveness is adjusted based on feedback metrics collected dynamically during program execution. Metrics such as prefetching accuracy and prefetching timeliness are used to vary aggressiveness in terms of prefetch distance (how far ahead of the current miss it fetches) and prefetch degree (the number of prefetches issued). The scheme is applied separately at both the L1 and L2 cache levels. We previously proposed a Hybrid Adaptive prefetcher for the Data Prefetching Competition (DPC-1) which uses a hybrid PC-based Stride/Sequential prefetcher. In this work, we also consider hybrid schemes that use the CZone with Delta Correlations (C/DC) prefetcher. Further, we breakdown the components of hybrid adaptive prefetching by evaluating the individual benefits of using hybrid schemes and using adaptivity. While hybrid prefetching improves performance over a single prefetcher, we demonstrate that the main benefit of adaptivity is the reduction in the number of prefetches without hurting performance. For a set of 18 SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks, the best hybrid adaptive scheme achieves an average (geometric mean) CPI improvement of 35% compared to no prefetching and 19% compared to a basic Stride prefetcher. Adaptivity makes it possible to reduce the number of prefetches issued by as much as 50% in some benchmarks without sacrificing performance