A framework for modeling and optimization of prescient instruction prefetch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes a framework for modeling macroscopic program behavior and applies it to optimizing prescient instruction prefetch -- novel technique that uses helper threads to improve single-threaded application performance by performing judicious and timely instruction prefetch. A helper thread is initiated when the main thread encounters a spawn point, and prefetches instructions starting at a distant target point. The target identifies a code region tending to incur I-cache misses that the main thread is likely to execute soon, even though intervening control flow may be unpredictable. The optimization of spawn-target pair selections is formulated by modeling program behavior as a Markov chain based on profile statistics. Execution paths are considered stochastic outcomes, and aspects of program behavior are summarized via path expression mappings. Mappings for computing reaching, and posteriori probability; path length mean, and variance; and expected path footprint are presented. These are used with Tarjan's fast path algorithm to efficiently estimate the benefit of spawn-target pair selections. Using this framework we propose a spawn-target pair selection algorithm for prescient instruction prefetch. This algorithm has been implemented, and evaluated for the Itanium Processor Family architecture. A limit study finds 4.8%to 17% speedups on an in-order simultaneous multithreading processor with eight contexts, over nextline and streaming I-prefetch for a set of benchmarks with high I-cache miss rates. The framework in this paper is potentially applicable to other thread speculation techniques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".