Run-time Adaptive Cache Management( PostScript version, PDF version)
Teresa Johnson
Phd thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, May 1998

The growing disparity between processor and memory performance has made cache misses increasingly expensive. Additionally, data and instruction caches are not always used efficiently, resulting in large numbers of cache misses. Therefore, the importance of cache performance improvements at each level of the memory hierarchy will continue to grow. For numeric programs there are several known compiler techniques for optimizing data cache performance. However, integer (non-numeric) programs often have irregular access patterns that are more difficult for the compiler to optimize. In the past, cache management techniques such as cache bypassing were implemented manually at the machine-language-programming level. As the available chip area grows, it makes sense to spend more resources to allow intelligent control over the cache management.

The objective of this dissertation is to improve cache effectiveness, taking advantage of the growing chip area, utilizing run-time adaptive cache management techniques, and optimizing both performance and cost of implementation. Specifically, the aim is to increase cache effectiveness for integer programs. This dissertation proposes a microarchitecture scheme where the hardware determines data placement within the cache hierarchy based on dynamic referencing behavior. This scheme is fully compatible with existing instruction set architectures. This dissertation also examines the theoretical upper bounds on the cache hit ratio that the proposed techniques can provide, for several integer applications. Then, detailed trace-driven simulations of several integer applications are used to show that the implementations described in this dissertation can achieve performance close to that of the upper bound.

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