Using Aggressor Thread Information to Improve Shared Cache Management for CMPs

—Shared cache allocation policies play an important role in determining CMP performance. The simplest policy, LRU, allocates cache implicitly as a consequence of its replacement decisions. But under high cache interference, LRU performs poorly because some memory-intensive threads, or aggressor threads, allocate cache that could be more gainfully used by other (less memory-intensive) threads. Techniques like cache partitioning can address this problem by performing explicit allocation to prevent aggressor threads from taking over the cache. Whether implicit or explicit, the key factor controlling cache allocation is victim thread selection. The choice of victim thread relative to the cache-missing thread determines each cache miss’s impact on cache allocation: if the two are the same, allocation doesn’t change, but if the two are different, then one cache block shifts from the victim thread to the cache-missing thread. In this paper, we study an omniscient policy, called ORACLE-V...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Wanli Liu, Donald Yeung
• Keywords: Aggressor Threads, Cache, Cache Allocation, Hardware, IEEEPACT 2009