The hardness of cache conscious data placement

Abstract

The growing gap between the speed of memory access and cache access has made cache misses an influential factor in program efficiency. Much effort has been spent recently on reducing the number of cache misses during program run. This effort includes wise rearranging of program code, cache-conscious data placement, and algorithmic modifications that improve the program cache behavior. In this work we investigate the complexity of finding the optimal placement of objects (or code) in the memory, in the sense that this placement reduces the cache misses to the minimum. We show that this problem is one of the toughest amongst the interesting algorithmic problems in computer science. In particular, suppose one is given a sequence of memory accesses and one has to place the data in the memory so as to minimize the number of cache misses for this sequence. We show that if P ≠ NP, then one cannot efficiently approximate the optimal solution even up to a very liberal approximation ratio. Thus, this problem joins the small family of extremely inapproximable optimization problems. The other two famous members in this family are minimum coloring and maximum clique.