Custom Tailored Suite of Random Forests for Prefetcher Adaptation (2008.00176v1)

Abstract: To close the gap between memory and processors, and in turn improve performance, there has been an abundance of work in the area of data/instruction prefetcher designs. Prefetchers are deployed in each level of the memory hierarchy, but typically, each prefetcher gets designed without comprehensively accounting for other prefetchers in the system. As a result, these individual prefetcher designs do not always complement each other, and that leads to low average performance gains and/or many negative outliers. In this work, we propose SuitAP (Suite of random forests for Adaptation of Prefetcher system configuration), which is a hardware prefetcher adapter that uses a suite of random forests to determine at runtime which prefetcher should be ON at each memory level, such that they complement each other. Compared to a design with no prefetchers, using SuitAP we improve IPC by 46% on average across traces generated from SPEC2017 suite with 12KB overhead. Moreover, we also reduce negative outliers using SuitAP.