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

Nayana Prasad Nagendra, Grant Ayers, David I. August, Hyoun Kyu Cho, Svilen Kanev, Christos Kozyrakis, Trivikram Krishnamurthy, Heiner Litz, Tipp Moseley, Parthasarathy Ranganathan

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%.