The short answer is no, because the machine language doesn't allow general manipulation of the cache. So the cache is pretty strictly controlled by the hardware

The short answer is no, because the machine language doesn't allow general manipulation of the cache. So the cache is pretty strictly controlled by the hardware. In general the hardware works very well for a wide variety of different workloads. It can often work better than a compiler can, because it works at runtime, and is thus flexible to changes in workloads. The preloading optimization you mentioned is sort of done already: it's called prefetching. The idea is a cache will automatically cache memory near where you just accessed, because for a lot of memory intensive operations you are linearly scanning a specific section of memory.