An Adaptive Shared/Private NUCA Cache Partitioning Scheme for Chip Multiprocessors

  • Authors:
  • Haakon Dybdahl;Per Stenstrom

  • Affiliations:
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. dybdahl@idi.ntnu.no;Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96 Goteborg, Sweden. pers@ce.chalmers.se

  • Venue:
  • HPCA '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE 13th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The significant speed-gap between processor and memory and the limited chip memory bandwidth make last-level cache performance crucial for future chip multiprocessors. To use the capacity of shared last-level caches efficiently and to allow for a short access time, proposed non-uniform cache architectures (NUCAs) are organized into per-core partitions. If a core runs out of cache space, blocks are typically relocated to nearby partitions, thus managing the cache as a shared cache. This uncontrolled sharing of all resources may unfortunately result in pollution that degrades performance. We propose a novel non-uniform cache architecture in which the amount of cache space that can be shared among the cores is controlled dynamically. The adaptive scheme estimates, continuously, the effect of increasing decreasing the shared partition size on the overall performance. We show that our scheme outperforms a private and shared cache organization as well as a hybrid NUCA organization in which blocks in a local partition can spill over to neighbor core partitions.