Unfavorable Strides in Cache Memory Systems

摘要

An important issue in obtaining high performance on a scientific application running on a cache-based computer system is the behavior of the cache when data is accessed at a constant stride. Others who have discussed this issue have noted an odd phenomenon in such situations: a few particular innocent-looking strides result in sharply reduced cache efficiency. In this paper, this problem is analyzed, and a simple formula is presented that accurately gives the cache efficiency for various cache parameters and data strides.