Performance evaluation of cache replacement policies for the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite

Replacement policy, one of the key factors determining the effectiveness of a cache, becomes even more important with latest technological trends toward highly associative caches. The state-of-the-art processors employ various policies such as Random, Least Recently Used (LRU), Round-Robin, and PLRU (Pseudo LRU), indicating that there is no common wisdom about the best one. Optimal yet unattainable policy would replace cache memory block whose next reference is the farthest away in the future, among all memory blocks present in the set. In our quest for replacement policy as close to optimal as possible, we thoroughly explored the design space of existing replacement mechanisms using SimpleScalar toolset and SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite, across wide range of cache sizes and organizations. In order to better understand the behavior of different policies, we introduced new measures, such as cumulative distribution of cache hits in the LRU stack. We also dynamically monitored the number ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACMSE
• Authors: Hussein Al-Zoubi, Aleksandar Milenkovic, Milena Milenkovic
• Keywords: ACMSE 2004, Cache, Cache Memory, Replacement Policy, Theoretical Computer Science