To stride or not to stride the memory access?
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Contributors
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
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | DIMES 2025 - Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Disruptive Memory Systems, Part of SOSP 2025 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York |
| Pages | 19-26 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (electronic) | 979-8-4007-2226-4 |
| Publication status | Published - 13 Oct 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | No |
External IDs
| Scopus | 105020783675 |
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Keywords
Research priority areas of TU Dresden
DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards
Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- High-Bandwidth Memory, Analysis, Benchmark, Memory Access Pattern