Fast configurable-cache tuning with a unified second-level cache

  • Authors:
  • Ann Gordon-Ross;Frank Vahid;Nikil D. Dutt

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL;University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Tuning a configurable cache subsystem to an application can greatly reduce memory hierarchy energy consumption. Previous tuning methods use a level one configurable cache only, or a second level with separate instruction and data configurable caches. We instead use a commercially-common unified second level cache, a seemingly minor difference that actually expands the configuration space from 500 to about 20 000. We develop additive way tuning for tuning a cache subsystem with this large space, yielding 61% energy savings and 9% performance improvements over a nonconfigurable cache, greatly outperforming an extension of a previous method.