Online Prediction of Applications Cache Utility

— General purpose architectures are designed to offer average high performance regardless of the particular application that is being run. Performance and power inefficiencies appear as a consequence for some programs. Reconfigurable hardware (cache hierarchy, branch predictor, execution units, bandwidth, etc.) has been proposed to overcome these inefficiencies by dynamically adapting the architecture to the application needs. However, nearly all the proposals use indirect measures or heuristics of performance to decide new configurations, what may lead to inefficiencies. In this paper we propose a runtime mechanism that allows to predict the throughput of an application on an architecture using a reconfigurable L2 cache. L2 cache size varies at a way granularity and we predict the performance of the same application on all other L2 cache sizes at the same time. We obtain for different L2 cache sizes an average error of 3.11%, a maximum error of 16.4% and standard deviation of ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SAMOS
• Authors: Miquel Moretó, Francisco J. Cazorla, Alex Ramírez, Mateo Valero
• Keywords: Cache Sizes, L2 Caches, Reconfigurable L2 Cache, SAMOS 2007