AsmDB: Understanding and Mitigating Front-End Stalls in Warehouse-Scale Computers

Abstract

It is well known that the datacenters hosting today’s cloud services waste a significant number of cycles on front-end stalls. However, prior work has provided little insights about the source of these front-end stalls and how to address them. This work analyzes the cause of instruction cache misses at a fleet-wide scale and proposes a new compiler-driven software code prefetching strategy to reduce instruction caches misses by 90%.

Christos Kozyrakis
Christos Kozyrakis
Professor, EE & CS

Stanford University