doi.org
September 2021 • Sriseshan Srikanth, Anirudh Jain, Thomas M. Conte, Erik P. DeBenedictis, Jeanine Cook
Sparse data applications have irregular access patterns that stymie modern memory architectures. Although hyper-sparse workloads have received considerable attention in the past, moderately-sparse workloads prevalent in machine learning applications, graph processing and HPC have not. Where the former can bypass the cache hierarchy, the latter fit in the cache. This article makes the observation that intelligent, near-processor cache management can improve bandwidth utilization for data-irregular accesses, thereby…