Adaptive Cache Clustering in Multi-Core Architecture

Adaptive Cache Clustering in Multi-Core Architecture

Masoud Dehyadegari

Abstract

Last level cache (LLC) management can considerably improve the performance of Chip Multi Processors (CMPs) by reducing the miss rate and decreasing the average L1 miss latency. LLC management approaches try to either map data to caches which are closer to cores, or exploit caches of neighboring cores to increase performance and reduce off-chip misses. To reduce the miss rate, we need to use cache slices of the other cores in NUCA architectures, but it increases the average L1 miss latency since the data to be accessed by cores are located in remote cache slices. As a result, designing an intelligent management approach to improve the system performance on a variety of workloads and systems is necessary. In this paper, an adaptive cache clustering called ACC is presented. ACC augments L2 cache size by using the L2 cache slices of neighboring cores adaptively. ACC selects cache slices with minimum distance to the target core while evaluating the amount of L2 cache slices being used on the surrounding tiles. To validate our approach, we apply several applications from SPEC CPU2006 and PARSEC benchmark suites. The results show the effectiveness of our approach, as we get speedup by up to 18%.

Keywords

Chip Multiprocessor, Caches, Parallel Architectures

References