Data access type aware replacement policy for cache clustering organization of chip multiprocessors

Abstract

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) are becoming the trend of mainstream computing platforms. The design of an efficient on-chip memory hierarchy is one of the key challenges in computer architecture. Tiled architecture and non-uniform cache architecture (NUCA) is commonly adopted in modern CMPs. Previous efforts on cache replacement policy usually assume an unified last-level cache or running multiprogrammed workloads. However, few researches focus on the replacement policy of cache clustering scheme running parallel workloads. Cache clustering scheme can improve the system performance on parallel performance, which is a tradeoff between shared cache organization and private cache organization which adopts cache replication. In cache clustering scheme, cache blocks in last-level cache can be subdivided into eight types. In this work we propose Data access Type Aware Replacement Policy (DTARP) for cache clustering organization, DTARP classifies data blocks in last-level cache into different access types, and designs the insertion and the victim selection policies according to different data access types based on traditional LRU policy. The global shared data will be kept in last-level cache longer than before. Simulation results show that DTARP can improve the system performance of cluster scheme using LRU policy by 10.9% on average. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.