Current techniques for prefetching linked data structures (LDS) exploit the work available in one loop iteration or recursive call to overlap pointer chasing latency. Jump-pointers, which provide direct access to non-adjacent nodes, can be used for prefetching when loop and recursive procedure bodies are small and do not have sufficient work to overlap a long latency. This paper describes a framework for jump-pointer prefetching (JPP) that supports four prefetching idioms: queue, full, chain, and root jumping and three implementations: software-only, hardware-only, and a cooperative software/hardware technique. On a suite of pointer intensive programs, jump-pointer prefetching reduces memory stall time by 72% for software, 83% for cooperative and 55% for hardware, producing speedups of 15%, 20% and 22% respectively.
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