Cache contention and application performance prediction for multi-core systems

—The ongoing move to chip multiprocessors (CMPs) permits greater sharing of last-level cache by processor cores but this sharing aggravates the cache contention problem, potentially undermining performance improvements. Accurately modeling the impact of inter-process cache contention on performance and power consumption is required for optimized process assignment. However, techniques based on exhaustive consideration of process-to-processor mappings and cycleaccurate simulation are inefficient or intractable for CMPs, which often permit a large number of potential assignments. This paper proposes CAMP, a fast and accurate shared cache aware performance model for multi-core processors. CAMP estimates the performance degradation due to cache contention of processes running on CMPs. It uses reuse distance histograms, cache access frequencies, and the relationship between the throughput and cache miss rate of each process to predict its effective cache size when running concurrently an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Chi Xu, Xi Chen, Robert P. Dick, Zhuoqing Morley Mao
• Keywords: Cache, Cache Contention, Cache Contention Problem, ISPASS 2010, Software Engineering