Cache hierarchies have been traditionally designed for usage by a single application, thread or core. As multi-threaded (MT) and multi-core (CMP) platform architectures emerge and their workloads range from single-threaded and multithreaded applications to complex virtual machines (VMs), a shared cache resource will be consumed by these different entities generating heterogeneous memory access streams exhibiting different locality properties and varying memory sensitivity. As a result, conventional cache management approaches that treat all memory accesses equally are bound to result in inefficient space utilization and poor performance even for applications with good locality properties. To address this problem, this paper presents a new cache management framework (CQoS) that (1) recognizes the heterogeneity in memory access streams, (2) introduces the notion of QoS to handle the varying degrees of locality and latency sensitivity and (3) assigns and enforces priorities to streams ba...
Ravi R. Iyer