Optimize the application

Performance Optimization

You can use software prefetching to improve performance.

The code to enable prefetching is:

    

        
        
                    #if defined(ENABLE_PREFETCH) && defined (DIST)
            const int prefetch_distance = DIST * kStride * kLineSize;
            __builtin_prefetch(&buffer[position + prefetch_distance], 0, 0);
        #endif
        
    

To enable data prefetching, recompile the application with 2 defines. You can experiment with values of DIST to see how performance is impacted.

The white paper shows a graph of various values of DIST and explains how the performance saturates at a DIST value of 40 on the N1SDP hardware. The example below uses 100 for DIST.

To compile with prefetching:

    

        
        
            g++ -g -O3 -DENABLE_PREFETCH -DDIST=100 stride.cpp -o stride
        
    

Run the perf command again to count instructions and cycles.

    

        
        
            perf stat -e instructions,cycles ./stride
        
    

The output is similar to:

    

        
        Performance counter stats for './stride':

    14,002,762,166      instructions:u            #    0.63  insn per cycle
    22,106,858,662      cycles:u

       9.895357134 seconds time elapsed

       9.874959000 seconds user
       0.020003000 seconds sys

        
    

The time to run the original application was more than 20 seconds and with prefetching the time drops to under 10 seconds.

The table below shows the improvements in instructions, cycles, and IPC.

As outlined in the white paper, the IPC nearly triples and the runtime halves.

You can review how the other metrics change with prefetching enabled.