Cache pollution

About: Cache pollution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11353 publications have been published within this topic receiving 262139 citations.

Adaptive mode control: A static-power-efficient cache design

Abstract: Lower threshold voltages in deep submicron technologies cause more leakage current, increasing static power dissipation. This trend, combined with the trend of larger/more cache memories dominating die area, has prompted circuit designers to develop SRAM cells with low-leakage operating modes (e.g., sleep mode). Sleep mode reduces static power dissipation, but data stored in a sleeping cell is unreliable or lost. So, at the architecture level, there is interest in exploiting sleep mode to reduce static power dissipation while maintaining high performance.Current approaches dynamically control the operating mode of large groups of cache lines or even individual cache lines. However, the performance monitoring mechanism that controls the percentage of sleep-mode lines, and identifies particular lines for sleep mode, is somewhat arbitrary. There is no way to know what the performance could be with all cache lines active, so arbitrary miss rate targets are set (perhaps on a per-benchmark basis using profile information), and the control mechanism tracks these targets. We propose applying sleep mode only to the data store and not the tag store. By keeping the entire tag store active the hardware knows what the hypothetical miss rate would be if all data lines were active, and the actual miss rate can be made to precisely track it. Simulations show that an average of 73p of I-cache lines and 54p of D-cache lines are put in sleep mode with an average IPC impact of only 1.7p, for 64 KB caches.

Compiler support for software-based cache partitioning

Abstract: Cache memories have become an essential part of modern processors to bridge the increasing gap between fast processors and slower main memory. Until recently, cache memories were thought to impose unpredictable execution time behavior for hard real-time systems. But recent results show that the speedup of caches can be exploited without a significant sacrifice of predictability. These results were obtained under the assumption that real-time tasks be scheduled non-preemptively.This paper introduces a method to maintain predictability of execution time within preemptive, cached real-time systems and discusses the impact on compilation support for such a system. Preemptive systems with caches are made predictable via software-based cache partitioning. With this approach, the cache is divided into distinct portions associated with a real-time task, such that a task may only use its portion. The compiler has to support instruction and data partitioning for each task. Instruction partitioning involves non-linear control-flow transformations, while data partitioning involves code transformations of data references. The impact on execution time of these transformations is also discussed.

Cache replacement based on reuse-distance prediction

Abstract: Several cache management techniques have been proposed that indirectly try to base their decisions on cacheline reuse-distance, like Cache Decay which is a postdiction of reuse-distances: if a cacheline has not been accessed for some ldquodecay intervalrdquo we know that its reuse-distance is at least as large as this decay interval. In this work, we propose to directly predict reuse-distances via instruction-based (PC) prediction and use this information for cache level optimizations. In this paper, we choose as our target for optimization the replacement policy of the L2 cache, because the gap between the LRU and the theoretical optimal replacement algorithm is comparatively large for L2 caches. This indicates that, in many situations, there is ample room for improvement. We evaluate our reusedistance based replacement policy using a subset of the most memory intensive SPEC2000 and our results show significant benefits across the board.

Memory back up system with one cache memory and two physically separated main memories

Abstract: Apparatus for maintaining duplicate copies of information stored in fault-tolerant computer main memories is disclosed A non write-through cache memory associated with each of the system's processing elements stores computations generated by that processing element At a context switch, the stored information is sequentially written to two separate main memory units A separate status area in main memory is updated by the processing element both before and after each writing operation so that a fault occurring during data processing or during any storage operation leaves the system with sufficient information to be able to reconstruct the data without loss of integrity To efficiently transfer information between the cache memory and the system main memories without consuming a large amount of processing time at context switches, a block status memory associated with the cache memory contains an entry for each data block in the cache memory The entry indicates whether the corresponding data block has been modified during data processing or written with computational data from the processing element The storage operations are carried out by high-speed hardware which stores only the modified data blocks Additional special-purpose hardware simultaneously invalidates all cache memory entries so that a new task can be loaded and started