Prefetching – Predicting what will be most likely needed next

A very interesting paper has just been published  about prefetching, which is a nice machine learning solution: predicting which information will be most likely useful next and consequently can be prepared in advance:

Milad Hashemi, Kevin Swersky, Jamie A Smith, Grant Ayers, Heiner Litz, Jichuan Chang, Christos Kozyrakis & Parthasarathy Ranganathan 2018. Learning Memory Access Patterns. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.02329.

Prefetching is the process of predicting future memory accesses that will miss in the on-chip cache and access memory based on past history. Each of these memory addresses are generated by a memory instruction (a load/store). Memory instructions are a subset of all instructions that interact with
the addressable memory of the computer system.

 

There is a nice article in the MIT Technology Review by Will Knight on March, 8, 2018 on the similarities on how human improve their behaviour with age – a very nice read:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610453/your-next-computer-could-improve-with-age/?set=