Identifying opportunities for automatic remote field cloning.

Optimizing compilers can automatically re-arrange data objects to produce memory reference patterns with better reference locality while retaining correct application semantics. This paper describes a new technique, Remote Field Cloning (RFC), that consists of replicating the value from a field of a remote data object. This replication prevents long jumps in the data references of an application. RFC was motivated by work on cache-conscious re-engineering of algorithms. When hand-crafted into suitable algorithms, RFC produces speedups of up to 40% for a well-know refinement-based pathfinding problem. This paper presents a motivating example and a general problem statement of remote field cloning as an optimization problem. A new algorithm that discovers opportunities for RFC is applied to the SPEC2000 benchmark suite and discovers many such opportunities. However a correlation of the percentage of execution time spent in procedures that contain these opportunities reveals that the expected impact of RFC in the SPEC2000 suite is limited.