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In computer science, locality of reference, also known as the principle of locality, [1] is the tendency of a processor to access the same set of memory locations repetitively over a short period of time. [2] There are two basic types of reference locality – temporal and spatial locality. Temporal locality refers to the reuse of specific data ...
In computing, a memory access pattern or IO access pattern is the pattern with which a system or program reads and writes memory on secondary storage.These patterns differ in the level of locality of reference and drastically affect cache performance, [1] and also have implications for the approach to parallelism [2] [3] and distribution of workload in shared memory systems. [4]
Most modern CPUs are so fast that for most program workloads, the bottleneck is the locality of reference of memory accesses and the efficiency of the caching and memory transfer between different levels of the hierarchy [citation needed]. As a result, the CPU spends much of its time idling, waiting for memory I/O to complete.
[1] [2] The novelty of PGAS is that the portions of the shared memory space may have an affinity for a particular process, thereby exploiting locality of reference in order to improve performance. A PGAS memory model is featured in various parallel programming languages and libraries, including: Coarray Fortran , Unified Parallel C , Split-C ...
When a computer program accesses the same data repeatedly, this is called locality of reference. Holding frequently used values in registers can be critical to a program's performance. Register allocation is performed either by a compiler in the code generation phase, or manually by an assembly language programmer.
Simple spacetime diagrams can help clarify the issues related to locality. [2] A way to describe the issues of locality suitable for discussion of quantum mechanics is illustrated in the diagram. A particle is created in one location, then split and measured in two other, spatially separated, locations.
A reference is an abstract data type and may be implemented in many ways. Typically, a reference refers to data stored in memory on a given system, and its internal value is the memory address of the data, i.e. a reference is implemented as a pointer. For this reason a reference is often said to "point to" the data.
The offset is often small in relation to the size of current computer memories. However, the principle of locality of reference applies: over a short time span, most of the data items a program wants to access are fairly close to each other. This addressing mode is closely related to the indexed absolute addressing mode.