SC Conference - Activity Details

Jiang Lin  (Iowa State University)

Qingda Lu  (Ohio State University)

Xiaoning Ding  (Ohio State University)

Zhao Zhang  (Iowa State University)

Xiaodong Zhang  (Ohio State University)

Ponnuswamy Sadayappan  (Ohio State University)

Cache Techniques

Tuesday,  02:30PM - 03:00PM

Room PB255

The management of shared caches in multicore processors is a critical and challenging task. Many hardware and OS-based methods have been proposed. However, they may be hardly adopted in practice due to their non-trivial overheads, high complexities, and/or limited abilities to handle increasingly complicated scenarios of cache contention caused by many-cores. In order to turn cache partitioning methods into reality in the management of multicore processors, we propose to provide an affordable and lightweight hardware support to coordinate with OS-based cache management policies. The proposed methods are scalable to many-cores, and perform comparably with other proposed hardware solutions, but have much lower overheads, therefore can be easily adopted in commodity processors. Having conducted extensive experiments with 37 multi-programming workloads, we show the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methods. For example on 8-core systems, one of our proposed policies improves performance over LRU-based hardware cache management by 14.5\% on average.

The full paper can be found in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society