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Locality is a type of predictable behavior that occurs in computer systems. Systems that exhibit strong locality of reference are great candidates for performance optimization through the use of techniques such as the caching, prefetching for memory and advanced branch predictors of a processor core.
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]
In computer science, partitioned global address space (PGAS) is a parallel programming model paradigm. PGAS is typified by communication operations involving a global memory address space abstraction that is logically partitioned, where a portion is local to each process, thread, or processing element.
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.
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 protocol must implement the basic requirements for coherence. It can be tailor-made for the target system or application. Protocols can also be classified as snoopy or directory-based. Typically, early systems used directory-based protocols where a directory would keep a track of the data being shared and the sharers.
In virtual memory systems, thrashing may be caused by programs or workloads that present insufficient locality of reference: if the working set of a program or a workload cannot be effectively held within physical memory, then constant data swapping, i.e., thrashing, may occur. The term was first used during the tape operating system days to ...
It could be worse: IBM System/360 mainframes only have an unsigned 12-bit offset. 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.