Abstract: According to one example embodiment of the inventive subject matter, there is provided a mechanism that controls which prefetchers are applied to execute an application in a computing system by turning them on and off. In one embodiment, this may be accomplished for example with a software control process that may run in the background. In another example embodiment, this may be accomplished using a hardware control machine, or a combination of hardware and software. The prefetchers are turned on and off in order to increase the performance of the computing system.