To stride or not to stride the memory access?

Publikation: Beitrag in Buch/Konferenzbericht/Sammelband/GutachtenBeitrag in KonferenzbandBeigetragen

Beitragende

Abstract

Due to the increasing gap between CPU performance and memory bandwidth, memory access patterns play more and more a significant role for efficient data processing. The current core assumption is that a sequential access pattern delivers the best performance, especially when the data to be processed is stored in adjacent memory locations (contiguous memory). Given the continuous advances in memory technologies, it is of course questionable whether this assumption still holds true. To answer this question, we present a comprehensive experimental comparison of the sequential and the strided access pattern for data stored in contiguous memory on modern disruptive memory systems in this paper. As we are going to show, the core assumption must be revised, as the strided access pattern with a well-chosen stride size clearly outperforms the sequential access pattern. Even a SIMD-accelerated sequential access is considerably slower than the best-performing scalar strided access. In particular, we explain the differences, highlight further advantages, and present open challenges of the strided access pattern on disruptive memory systems.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
TitelDIMES 2025 - Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Disruptive Memory Systems, Part of SOSP 2025
Herausgeber (Verlag)Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York
Seiten19-26
Seitenumfang8
ISBN (elektronisch)979-8-4007-2226-4
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 13 Okt. 2025
Peer-Review-StatusNein

Externe IDs

Scopus 105020783675

Schlagworte

Forschungsprofillinien der TU Dresden

Fächergruppen, Lehr- und Forschungsbereiche, Fachgebiete nach Destatis

Schlagwörter

  • High-Bandwidth Memory, Analysis, Benchmark, Memory Access Pattern