locality of reference

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locality of reference

Also known as "locality in space" and "spatial locality," it refers to the fact that most instructions in a program are in routines that are executed over and over, and that these routines are in a reasonably confined area. It also refers to data fields in close proximity to each other.

This is the principle behind memory and disk caches, in which data or instructions are placed in higher-speed memory and get read many times before the memory is overwritten by another set. See cache.

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References in periodicals archive ?

Thiebaut's work [10] with synthetic traces demonstrated the structural importance of the locality of reference in real programs and its impact on hit and miss ratios.

Dynamic distribution of Java applications

Examples of transformations for optimization of locality of reference are scalar replacement, unroll-and-jam, loop interchange, tiling, memory copying, and data alignment.

Communion: a new strategy for memory management in high-performance computer systems *

Cache systems can hide the slow speed of main memory only, when the memory accesses generated by a program have good locality of reference.

Operating system support for high-speed communication

The large data set with low locality of reference results in high data cache miss rates and low (less than 30%) effective utilization of a single-threaded processor.

Lexra Announces Highest Performance 32-bit RISC Processor For New Family of High-Touch Application SOCs