Analyzing Instructtion Sic Based Cache Replacement Policies

Architecture of Computing Systems - ARCS 2011

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems, ARCS 2011, held in Lake Como, Italy, in February 2011. The 22 revised full papers presented in seven technical sessions were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on customization and application specific accelerators; multi/many-core architectures; adaptive system architectures; processor architectures; memory architectures optimization; organic and autonomic computing; network-on-chip architectures.

Analyzing Instructtion [sic] Based Cache Replacement Policies

The increasing speed gap between microprocessors and off-chip DRAM makes last-level caches (LLCs) a critical component for computer performance. Multi core processors aggravate the problem since multiple processor cores compete for the LLC. As a result, LLCs typically consume a significant amount of the die area and effective utilization of LLCs is mandatory for both performance and power efficiency. We present a novel replacement policy for last-level caches (LLCs). The fundamental observation is to view LLCs as a shared resource among multiple address streams with each stream being generated by a static memory access instruction. The management of LLCs in both single-core and multi-core processors can then be modeled as a competition among multiple instructions. In our proposed scheme, we prioritize those instructions based on the number of LLC accesses and reuses and only allow cache lines having high instruction priorities to replace those of low priorities. The hardware support for our proposed replacement policy is light-weighted. Our experimental results based on a set of SPEC 2006 benchmarks show that it achieves significant performance improvement upon the least-recently used (LRU) replacement policy for benchmarks with high numbers of LLC misses. To handle LRU-friendly workloads, the set sampling technique is adopted to retain the benefits from the LRU replacement policy.

Real-Time Systems Symposium