For Software Performance, the Way Data is Accessed Matters!

For Software Performance, the Way Data is Accessed Matters!

In our experiments with the memory access pattern, we have seen that good data locality is a key to good software performance. Accessing memory sequentially and splitting the data set into small-sized pieces which are processed individually improves data locality and software speed. In this post, we will present a few techniques to improve the…

The memory subsystem from the viewpoint of software: how memory subsystem affects software performance 2/3

The memory subsystem from the viewpoint of software: how memory subsystem affects software performance 2/3

We continue the investigation from the previous post, trying to measure how the memory subsystem affects software performance. We write small programs (kernels) to quantify the effects of cache line, memory latency, TLB cache, cache conflicts, vectorization and branch prediction.