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RXT: RefleXive Address Translation for Pointer-Chasing Workloads
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Division of Computer Systems. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Computer Architecture and Computer Communication. (UART)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9376-2925
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Computer Systems. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Division of Computer Systems. (UART)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6602-1988
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Computer Systems. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Division of Computer Systems. (UART)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8267-0232
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Computer Architecture and Computer Communication. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Department of Information Technology, Division of Computer Systems. (UART)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9448-5595
2025 (English)In: 2025 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2025, p. 1062-1073Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

With increasingly irregular memory access patterns in Indirect Memory Access (IMA) and Graph Processing (GP) applications, Virtual Address Translation (VAT) not only has become a major performance bottleneck, but also a key contributor to high power consumption in out-of-order (OoO) multi-core processor pipeline. We find that this problem can be attributed to a large extent to an inefficient utilization of TLBs in pointer-chasing instructions (i.e. load-to-load), which constitute a significant portion of workloads in IMA/GP. Conventionally, VATs for pointer-chasing are performed via a series of TLB look-ups: one for each load in the pointer chain. However, this approach is sub-optimal as it overlooks the correlations between pointers, missing opportunities to perform VATs through more costeffective calculations instead of relying on the more expensive TLB look-ups. This work draws on the insight that in pointer-chasing workloads, the physical page holding an upstream pointer is often at a fixed distance to the physical page where a downstream pointer resides. Building on this insight, we introduce RefleXive address Translation (RXT), which encodes the physical page distance (termed PageDist) between an upstream and downstream pointer into the unused upper 16 bits of the upstream pointer's virtual address. Consequently, RXT can compute the translation of a pointer by directly adding the PageDist to its residing address (the physical address where the pointer is stored). This process can be recursively applied throughout the pointer-chasing sequence, transforming address translation from a sequence of TLB accesses to computes. Through gem5 full-system simulation, RXT reduces TLB energy consumption for pointer-chasing applications by an average of 41.48 % (up to 62.50 %) and decreases overall core power density by 4.65 % (up to 13.09 %), without compromising application execution time. In fact, RXT even improves program runtime by an average of 0.71 % (up to 2.09 %).

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2025. p. 1062-1073
Series
IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, ISSN 1530-2075, E-ISSN 1530-2075
Keywords [en]
Virtual address translation, indirect memory access, graph applications
National Category
Computer Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-575490DOI: 10.1109/IPDPS64566.2025.00098ISI: 001552207700090ISBN: 979-8-3315-3237-6 (electronic)ISBN: 979-8-3315-3238-3 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-575490DiVA, id: diva2:2027139
Conference
International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (IPDPS), 3-7 June, 2025, Milano, Italy
Part of project
Don’t hack my memory: Towards efficient, ubiquitous memory protection, Swedish Research CouncilAvailable from: 2026-01-12 Created: 2026-01-12 Last updated: 2026-02-10Bibliographically approved

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Aligholipour, RashidAimoniotis, PavlosKaxiras, StefanosYao, Yuan

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