Run-time Adaptive Cache Management (PostScript version, PDF version)
Teresa L. Johnson, Daniel A. Connors, and Wen-mei W. Hwu
Proceedings of the 31st Annual Hawaii International Conference on system Sciences, Wailea, Hawaii, Jan. 5-8, 1998

As memory latencies increase, the importance of cache performance improvements at each level of the memory hierarchy will continue to grow. Also, as the available chip area grows, it makes sense to spend more resources to allow intelligent control over the cache management, in order to adapt the caching decisions to the dynamic accessing behavior. In the past, cache management techniques such as cache bypassing were implemented manually at the instruction programming level. Additionally, spatial locality was often exploited via large block sizes and other fixed amounts of hardware prefetching. Our goal is to develop a framework for adaptive and automatic control of cache management techniques. The objective of our research is to improve cache effectiveness in order to deal with long memory latencies, utilizing run-time adaptive cache management techniques, optimizing both performance and cost of implementation. Specifically, we are aiming to increase data cache effectiveness for integer programs. We propose a microarchitecture scheme where the hardware determines data placement based on dynamic referencing behavior. This scheme is fully compatible with existing Instruction Set Architectures.


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