Target prediction for indirect jumps
Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Accurate indirect branch prediction
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The cascaded predictor: economical and adaptive branch target prediction
MICRO 31 Proceedings of the 31st annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Using complete system simulation to characterize SPECjvm98 benchmarks
Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Supercomputing
Java Virtual Machine Specification
Java Virtual Machine Specification
Complete Computer System Simulation: The SimOS Approach
IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology: Systems & Technology
A study of the cache and branch performance issues with running Java on current hardware platforms
COMPCON '97 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE International Computer Conference
Tuning branch predictors to support virtual method invocation in java
COOTS'99 Proceedings of the 5th conference on USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies & Systems - Volume 5
Adapting branch-target buffer to improve the target predictability of java code
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)
Comparing low-level behavior of SPEC CPU and java workloads
ACSAC'05 Proceedings of the 10th Asia-Pacific conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture
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Java programs are increasing in popularity and prevalence on numerous platforms, including high-performance general-purpose processors. The dynamic characteristics of the Java runtime system present unique performance challenges for several aspects of microarchitecture design. In this work, we focus on the effects of indirect branches on branch target address prediction performance. Runtime bytecode translation, just-in-time compilation, frequent calls to the native interface libraries, and dependence on virtual methods increase the frequency of polymorphic indirect branches. Therefore, accurate target address prediction for indirect branches is very important for Java code. This paper characterizes the indirect branch behavior in Java processing and proposes an adaptive branch target buffer (BTB) design to enhance the predictability of the targets. Our characterization shows that a traditional BTB will frequently mispredict polymorphic indirect branches, significantly deteriorating predictor accuracy in Java processing. Therefore, we propose a Rehashable branch target buffer (R-BTB), which dynamically identifies polymorphic indirect branches and adapts branch target storage to accommodate multiple targets for a branch. The R-BTB improves the target predictability of indirect branches without sacrificing overall target prediction accuracy. Simulations show that the R-BTB eliminates 61% of the indirect branch mispredictions suffered with a traditional BTB for Java programs running in interpreter mode (46% in JIT mode), which leads to a 57% decrease in overall target address misprediction rate (29% in JIT mode). With an equivalent number of entries, the R-BTB also outperforms the previously proposed target cache scheme for a majority of Java programs by adapting to a greater variety of indirect branch behaviors.