Elastic cooperative caching: an autonomous dynamically adaptive memory hierarchy for chip multiprocessors

Next generation tiled microarchitectures are going to be limited by off-chip misses and by on-chip network usage. Furthermore, these platforms will run an heterogeneous mix of applications with very different memory needs, leading to significant optimization opportunities. Existing adaptive memory hierarchies use either centralized structures that limit the scalability or software based resource allocation that increases programming complexity. We propose Elastic Cooperative Caching, a dynamic and scalable memory hierarchy that adapts automatically and autonomously to application behavior for each node. Our configuration uses elastic shared/private caches with fully autonomous and distributed repartitioning units for better scalability. Furthermore, we have extended our elastic configuration with an Adaptive Spilling mechanism to use the shared cache space only when it can produce a performance improvement. Elastic caches allow both the creation of big local private caches for th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Enric Herrero, José González, Ramon Canal
• Keywords: Cache, Elastic Shared/private Caches, Hardware, ISCA 2010, Off-chip Misses