Soft-OLP: Improving Hardware Cache Performance through Software-Controlled Object-Level Partitioning

—Performance degradation of memory-intensive programs caused by the LRU policy’s inability to handle weaklocality data accesses in the last level cache is increasingly serious for two reasons. First, the last-level cache remains in the CPU’s critical path, where only simple management mechanisms, such as LRU, can be used, precluding some sophisticated hardware mechanisms to address the problem. Second, the commonly used shared cache structure of multi-core processors has made this critical path even more performance-sensitive due to intensive inter-thread contention for shared cache resources. Researchers have recently made efforts to address the problem with the LRU policy by partitioning the cache using hardware or OS facilities guided by run-time locality information. Such approaches often rely on special hardware support or lack enough accuracy. In contrast, for a large class of programs, the locality information can be accurately predicted if access patterns are recognized t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Qingda Lu, Jiang Lin, Xiaoning Ding, Zhao Zhang, Xiaodong Zhang, P. Sadayappan
• Keywords: Cache, Data Objects, Hardware, IEEEPACT 2009, Object-level Cache Partitioning