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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.
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.
The main hurdle in implementing the working set model is keeping track of the working set. The working set window is a moving window. At each memory reference a new reference appears at one end and the oldest reference drops off the other end. A page is in the working set if it is referenced in the working set window.
Another definition is: "a multiprocessor is cache consistent if all writes to the same memory location are performed in some sequential order". [7] Rarely, but especially in algorithms, coherence can instead refer to the locality of reference. Multiple copies of the same data can exist in different cache simultaneously and if processors are ...
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.
Note how the use of A[i][j] with multi-step indexing as in C, as opposed to a neutral notation like A(i,j) as in Fortran, almost inevitably implies row-major order for syntactic reasons, so to speak, because it can be rewritten as (A[i])[j], and the A[i] row part can even be assigned to an intermediate variable that is then indexed in a separate expression.