# Taha Azzaoui - 2018.10.01

### Introduction

One of the most illustrative examples of the importance of data locality arises in the implementation of matrix multiplication. This is because the computation of the product of two matrices is inherently I/O bound and therefore forces us to think about how best to access the elements of each matrix.

### Two Approaches

To start, let’s consider two very similar naive implementations. Let A, B, and C be n x n matrices

#### Implementation 1 (ijk)

for(int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
for(int j = 0; j < n; ++j)
for(int k = 0; k < n; ++k)
C[i][j] += A[i][k] * B[k][j];  

#### Implementation 2 (ikj)

for(int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
for(int k = 0; k < n; ++k)
for(int j = 0; j < n; ++j)
C[i][j] += A[i][k] * B[k][j];  

Where implementation 2 is the same as implementation 1 but with the inner loop swapped with the second loop. Now let’s compare the running time of the two implementations with n = 1024.

[taha@arch ~]$time ./ijk ./ijk 11.95s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 12.017 total [taha@arch ~]$ time ./ikj
./ikj  4.00s user 0.00s system 99% cpu 4.005 total

On my machine, implementation 1 takes almost 3 times as long as implementation 2! To see why, let’s focus on the inner loop of each one. Recall that C arranges its multidimensional arrays in row-major order. That is, if A is a 3 x 3 matrix, it will be arranged in memory as follows:

The problem with implementation 1 is that matrix B is accessed column-wise. On the first iteration, we access the element at B[0][0], at which point the processor loads a cache line from main memory into the L1 cache. On the next iterations, we access B[1][0], B[2][0], B[3][0], etc, which, assuming a 64-byte cache line, forces the processor to fetch another cache line from main memory every time. In this implementation, only a single element is used from every cache line loaded from memory, the rest are thrown away.

Compare this to implementation 2. The first iteration accesses B[0][0], for which the processor loads a cache line from main memory into the L1 cache. Then, the following iterations access B[0][1], B[0][2], B[0][3], etc. Since these elements are all in the same row, they’ll also be in the same cache line. Therefore, every time a memory access forces us to fetch a cache line from main memory, we get the rest of the elements in the line for free. Clearly, this approach makes much better use of the cache.

### Note

While multidimensional arrays are arranged in row-major order in C, some languages, most notably Fortran, arrange matrices in column-major order. As a general principle, memory should be accessed sequentially when possible in order to make good use of the cache.

### Source Code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define N 1024
#define MAX 10000

int main(int argc, char* argv[]){
double **A = (double**)malloc(N*sizeof(double*));
double **B = (double**)malloc(N*sizeof(double*));
double **C = (double**)malloc(N*sizeof(double*));

for(int i = 0; i < N; ++i){
A[i] = (double*)malloc(N*sizeof(double));
B[i] = (double*)malloc(N*sizeof(double));
C[i] = (double*)malloc(N*sizeof(double));
}

// Fill matricies with random values
for(int i = 0; i < N; ++i)
for(int j = 0; j < N; ++j){
A[i][j] = drand48() *  MAX;
B[i][j] = drand48() * MAX;
C[i][j] = 0.0;
}

// Cache-friendly
for(int i = 0; i < N; ++i)
for(int k = 0; k < N; ++k)
for(int j = 0; j < N; ++j)
C[i][j] += A[i][k] * B[k][j];

// Cache-unfriendly
for(int i = 0; i < N; ++i)
for(int k = 0; k < N; ++k)
for(int j = 0; j < N; ++j)
C[i][j] += A[i][k] * B[k][j];

return 0;
}