Probabilistic Shared Cache Management (PriSM)

Proceedings of the 39th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Portland, OR, USA, June 9--13, 2012

Authors

1. R. Manikantan, Department of Computer Science and Automation
2. Kaushik Rajan, Microsoft Research India, Bangalore
3. R. Govindarajan, Department of Computer Science and Automation

Abstract

fluence on the overall performance of a multicore system. We observe that existing solutions control cache occupancy at a coarser granularity, do not scale well to large core counts and in some cases lack the flexibility to support a variety of performance goals. In this paper, we propose Probabilistic Shared Cache Management (PriSM), a framework to manage the cache occupancy of different cores at cache block granularity by controlling their eviction probabilities. The proposed framework requires only simple hardware changes to implement, can scale to larger core count and is flexible enough to support a variety of performance goals. We demonstrate the flexibility of PriSM, by computing the eviction probabilities needed to achieve goals like hit-maximization, fairness and QOS. PriSM-HitMax improves performance by 18.7% over LRU and 11.8% over previously proposed schemes in a sixteen core machine. PriSM-Fairness improves fairness over existing solutions by 23.3% along with a performance improvement of 19.0%. PriSM-QOS successfully achieves the desired QOS target

Download

Full Text