• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.11_12
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• pp.608-616
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• 2005

A cache architecture is proposed here which evokes prefetch at level 1 cache miss. Existing structures only prefetch at level 2 cache miss. In the proposed cache architecture, level 1 cache miss would select demand fetch block and prefetch block from the level 2 cache and store to level 1 cache and prefetch cache, respectively. According to an experimental analysis using 11 benchmark programs, the hierarchical cache architecture that employs both a level 1 cache prefetcher and a level 2 cache prefetcher obtained a maximum $19\%$ increased performance when compared to the cache architecture that employs only a level 2 cache prefetcher.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.12A no.1 s.91
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• pp.41-52
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• 2005

Memory reference instruction caused by cache miss is the critical factor that limits the processing power of processor. Cache prefetching technique is an effective way to reduce the latency due to memory access. However, excessively aggressive prefetch leads to cache pollution and finally to cancel out the advantage of prefetch. In this study, an active prefetch filtering scheme is introduced which dynamically decides whether to commence prefetching after referring a filtering table to reduce the cache pollution due to unnecessary prefetches. For the precision filtering, an evicted address referencing scheme has been proposed where the filter directly compares the current prefetch address with previous unnecessary prefetch addresses stored in filtering table. Moreover, a small sized exclusive prefetch cache has been introduced to increase the amount of eviction of unnecessarily prefetched addresses to enhance the accuracy of dynamic filtering. The exclusive prefetch cache also prevents useful demand data from being pushed out by prefetched data, while the evicted address direct referencing scheme enables the prefetch cache to keep most of useful prefetch data within its small size. Experimental results from commonly used general and multimedia benchmarks show that the average cache miss ratio has been decreased by $13.3{\%}$ by virtue of enhanced filtering accuracy compared with conventional schemes.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.11
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• pp.836-852
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• 2006

This paper proposes an L1 cache prefetch scheme using an excessively aggressive hardware prefetcher and a hardware prefetch filter having a small direct-mapped filtering cache. A quantitative analysis method has been introduced and applied to analyze nonideal effects of aggressive cache prefetching. From those analysis results, the structure and algorithm of a prefetch filter has been derived and simulated, and the overall system performance has been measured using a cycle-by-cycle cache simulator. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the overall system performance by 18% on the average over several benchmarks

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.306-315
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• 2006

In general, the hit ratio of the first level cache is one of the most important factors in determining the performance of computer systems. Prefetching from lower level memory structure is one of the most useful techniques for improving the hit ratio of the first level cache. In this paper, we propose a prefetch on continuous same page access (CSPA) scheme which improves the prefetch efficiency of the instruction cache and reduces prefetch cost at the same time. The proposed CSPA scheme traces the page addresses of executed instructions to count how many times the same memory page is accessed continuously. To increase the prefetch efficiency, the CSPA scheme initiates prefetch only if the number of accesses to the same page exceeds the threshold value. Generally, the size of a L1 cache block is smaller than that of a L2 cache block. Therefore, one L2 cache block contains a number of L1 cache blocks. To reduce the number of unnecessary accesses to the L2 cache due to prefetch, the CSPA scheme enables prefetch only when the missed L1 block and the prefetch L1 block are in the same L2 cache block, leading to reduced prefetch cost. According to our simulations, the proposed prefetching scheme improves the performance by up to 6.7%.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.13D no.4 s.107
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• pp.463-476
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• 2006

R-trees have been traditionally optimized for the I/O performance with the disk page as the tree node. Recently, researchers have proposed cache-conscious variations of R-trees optimized for the CPU cache performance in main memory environments, where the node size is several cache lines wide and more entries are packed in a node by compressing MBR keys. However, because there is a big difference between the node sizes of two types of R-trees, disk-optimized R-trees show poor cache performance while cache-optimized R-trees exhibit poor disk performance. In this paper, we propose a cache and disk optimized R-tree, called the PR-tree (Prefetching R-tree). For the cache performance, the node size of the PR-tree is wider than a cache line, and the prefetch instruction is used to reduce the number of cache misses. For the I/O performance, the nodes of the PR-tree are fitted into one disk page. We represent the detailed analysis of cache misses for range queries, and enumerate all the reasonable in-page leaf and nonleaf node sizes, and heights of in-page trees to figure out tree parameters for best cache and I/O performance. The PR-tree that we propose achieves better cache performance than the disk-optimized R-tree: a factor of 3.5-15.1 improvement for one-by-one insertions, 6.5-15.1 improvement for deletions, 1.3-1.9 improvement for range queries, and 2.7-9.7 improvement for k-nearest neighbor queries. All experimental results do not show notable declines of the I/O performance.

• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.13 no.4 s.52
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• pp.59-69
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• 1998

The terminology of data prefetching is introduced, which includes stride, repeat distance, stall, pending stall, prefetch degree, prefetch distance, and prefetch offset. The effectiveness of hardware data prefetching in reducing cache misses is shown by presenting a square matrix multiplication example. Thereafter the pitfalls of prefetching and possible solutions are discussed.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.27 no.8
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• pp.719-729
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• 2000

Prefetching aims at reducing memory latency by fetching, in advance, data that are likely to be requested by the processor in a near future. The effectiveness of prefetching is determined by how accurate the prediction on the needed instructions and data is. Most previous studies on prefetching were limited to proposing a particular prefetch scheme and its performance evaluation, paying little attention to theoretical aspects of prefetching. This paper focuses on the theoretical aspects of instruction prefetching. For this purpose, we propose a clairvoyant prefetch model that makes use of perfect history information. Based on this theoretical model, we analyzed upper limits on the prefetch prediction accuracies of the SPEC benchmarks. The results show that the prefetch prediction accuracy is very high when there is no cache. However, as the size of the instruction cache increases, the prefetch prediction accuracy drops drastically. For example, in the case of the spice benchmark, the prefetch prediction accuracy drops from 53% to 39% when the cache size increases from 2Kbyte to 16Kbyte (assuming 16byte block size). These results indicate that as the cache size increases, most localities are captured by the cache and that instruction prefetching based on the information extracted from the references that missed in the cache suffers from prediction inaccuracies

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.13A no.2 s.99
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• pp.123-136
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• 2006

The prefetching technique is an effective way to reduce the latency caused memory access. However, excessively aggressive prefetch not only leads to cache pollution so as to cancel out the benefits of prefetch but also increase bus traffic leading to overall performance degradation. In this thesis, a prefetch filtering scheme is proposed which dynamically decides whether to commence prefetching by referring a filtering table to reduce the cache pollution due to unnecessary prefetches In this thesis, First, prefetch hashing table 1bitSC filtering scheme(PHT1bSC) has been shown to analyze the lock problem of the conventional scheme, this scheme such as conventional scheme used to be N:1 mapping, but it has the two state to 1bit value of each entries. A complete block address table filtering scheme(CBAT) has been introduced to be used as a reference for the comparative study. A prefetch block address lookup table scheme(PBALT) has been proposed as the main idea of this paper which exhibits the most exact filtering performance. This scheme has a length of the table the same as the PHT1bSC scheme, the contents of each entry have the fields the same as CBAT scheme recently, never referenced data block address has been 1:1 mapping a entry of the filter table. On commonly used prefetch schemes and general benchmarks and multimedia programs simulates change cache parameters. The PBALT scheme compared with no filtering has shown enhanced the greatest 22%, the cache miss ratio has been decreased by 7.9% by virtue of enhanced filtering accuracy compared with conventional PHT2bSC. The MADT of the proposed PBALT scheme has been decreased by 6.1% compared with conventional schemes to reduce the total execution time.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.945-951
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• 2008

In this paper, a new high performance data cache scheme that improves exploitation of both the spatial and temporal locality is proposed. The proposed data cache consists of a hardware prefetch unit and two sub-caches such as a direct-mapped (DM) cache with a large block size and a fully associative buffer with a small block size. Spatial locality is exploited by fetching and storing large blocks into a direct mapped cache, and is enhanced by prefetching a neighboring block when a DM cache hit occurs. Temporal locality is exploited by storing small blocks from the DM cache in the fully associative buffer according to their activity in the DM cache when they are replaced. Experimental results on Spec2000 programs show that the proposed scheme can reduce the average miss ratio by $12.53%\sim23.62%$ and the AMAT by $14.67%\sim18.60%$ compared to the previous schemes such as direct mapped cache, 4-way set associative cache and SMI(selective mode intelligent) cache[8].

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.119-131
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• 2009

During a decade, e-Commerce environments supporting real-time transaction processing have been getting larger. In telecommunication and financial environments, research and building for main memory database systems have been doing to support real-time transaction processing. A research on indexing for fast transaction support focuses on reducing cache misses or reducing memory access latency when cache misses happen. In the paper, we propose a prefetch method for tree index structures to reduce memory access latency. We present a prefetch-efficient pCST-tree and show superiority of the proposed tree by experiments.