Reuse Distance-based Victim Cache for Effective Utilisation of Hybrid Main Memory System

Abstract

Hybrid main memories comprising DRAM and Non-volatile memories (NVM) are projected as potential replacements of the traditional DRAM-based memories. However, traditional cache management policies designed for improving the hit rate lack awareness of the comparative latency of read-write for NVM blocks where the write latency is more than the read latency. Therefore, developing cache management techniques that reduce costly write-backs of the NVM blocks, yet maintain a fair hit rate in the cache, is of paramount importance. We propose two techniques based on the use of a small victim cache associated with the last-level cache that helps in retaining on the chip critical DRAM and NVM blocks. Victim cache being a scarce resource, we intend to keep only performance-critical blocks in the victim cache by exploiting the idea of reuse distance. The first technique, Victim Cache Replacement Policy, works on the replacement policy of the victim cache by preferential eviction of DRAM blocks over NVM blocks. However, the second technique, Prioritized Partitioning of victim cache, logically partitions the victim cache, giving a smaller share to the DRAM blocks and a relatively larger share to the NVM blocks. Experimental evaluation on full-system simulator shows significant improvement in system performance and reduction in the number of write-backs to the NVM partition of the main memory compared to the baseline and existing technique. Additionally, NVM reads and DRAM miss rate are also improved, leading to further performance enhancement.