Pickle Prefetcher: Programmable and Scalable Last-Level Cache Prefetcher
Hoa Nguyen, Pongstorn Maidee, Jason Lowe-Power, Alireza Kaviani

TL;DR
The Pickle Prefetcher is a programmable LLC prefetcher that allows software-defined strategies to efficiently handle irregular memory access patterns, significantly improving performance in graph applications.
Contribution
It introduces a software-programmable prefetcher architecture that replaces complex hardware prediction with flexible software strategies, enhancing irregular pattern prefetching.
Findings
Achieves up to 1.74x speedup on BFS workloads.
Outperforms traditional prefetchers significantly.
Provides up to 1.40x speedup when combined with private cache prefetchers.
Abstract
Modern high-performance architectures employ large last-level caches (LLCs). While large LLCs can reduce average memory access latency for workloads with a high degree of locality, they can also increase latency for workloads with irregular memory access patterns. Prefetchers are widely used to reduce memory latency by prefetching data into the cache hierarchy before it is accessed by the core. However, existing prediction-based prefetchers often struggle with irregular memory access patterns, which are especially prevalent in modern applications. This paper introduces the Pickle Prefetcher, a programmable and scalable LLC prefetcher designed to handle independent irregular memory access patterns effectively. Instead of relying on static heuristics or complex prediction algorithms, Pickle Prefetcher allows software to define its own prefetching strategies using a simple programming…
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Taxonomy
TopicsParallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Cloud Computing and Resource Management · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
