# Cache rules everything around me

## 2018/10/01

### Introduction

I was recently trying to speed up some code that was running too slow and spent hours trying to figure out why it was thrashing.

The issue of data locality comes up so often when writing low-level code, so I’m writing this basically to remind myself why it matters so much.

### Matrix Products

I’ll be using matrix multiplication as an example here since any practical algorithm to compute the product runs in basically $O(n^3)$. Therefore, any speed ups we’re gonna get will have to with taking advantage of hardware rather than optimizing the algorithm.

### 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 middle 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. 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 DRAM. 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 DRAM. 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.

### Side Note

Not all languages store multidimensional arrays in row-major order. For example, Fortran and Matlab both use column major ordering for matrices. Although, if you’re using Fortran you probably have bigger problems to worry about :)

### 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;
}