Smart Cache

About: Smart Cache is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7680 publications have been published within this topic receiving 180618 citations.

Exploiting choice in resizable cache design to optimize deep-submicron processor energy-delay

Abstract: Cache memories account for a significant fraction of a chip's overall energy dissipation. Recent research advocates using "resizable" caches to exploit cache requirement variability in applications to reduce cache size and eliminate energy dissipation in the cache's unused sections with minimal impact on performance. Current proposals for resizable caches fundamentally vary in two design aspects: (1) cache organization, where one organization, referred to as selective-ways, varies the cache's set-associativity, while the other, referred to as selective-sets, varies the number of cache sets, and (2) resizing strategy, where one proposal statically sets the cache size prior to an application's execution, while the other allows for dynamic resizing both within and across applications. In this paper, we compare and contrast, for the first time, the proposed design choices for resizable caches, and evaluate the effectiveness of cache resizings in reducing the overall energy-delay in deep-submicron processors. In addition, we propose a hybrid selective-sets-and-ways cache organization that always offers equal or better resizing granularity than both of previously proposed organizations. We also investigate the energy savings from resizing d-cache and i-cache together to characterize the interaction between d-cache and i-cache resizings.

Organization of an integrated cache unit for flexible usage in cache system design

Abstract: Methods and apparatus are disclosed for realizing an integrated cache unit which may be flexibly used for cache system design. The preferred embodiment of the invention comprises both a cache memory and a cache controller on a single chip. In accordance with an alternative embodiment of the invention, the cache memory may be externally located. Flexible cache system design is achieved by the specification of desired cache features through the setting of appropriate cache option bits. The disclosed methods and apparatus support this user oriented approach to flexible system design. The actual setting of option bits may be peformed under software control and allows a high performance cache system to be designed with few parts, at low cost and with the ability to perform with high efficiency.

Data-aware cache state machine

Abstract: A method and system directed to improve effectiveness and efficiency of cache and data management by differentiating data based on certain attributes associated with the data and reducing the bottleneck to storage. The data-aware cache differentiates and manages data using a state machine having certain states. The data-aware cache may use data pattern and traffic statistics to retain frequently used data in cache longer by transitioning it into Sticky or StickyDirty states. The data-aware cache may also use content or application related attributes to differentiate and retain certain data in cache longer. Further, the data-aware cache may provide cache status and statistics information to a data-aware data flow manager, thus assisting data-aware data flow manager to determine which data to cache and which data to pipe directly through, or to switch cache policies dynamically, thus avoiding some of the overhead associated with caches. The data-aware cache may also place clean and dirty data in separate states, enabling more efficient cache mirroring and flush, thus improve system reliability and performance.

Popularity-driven content caching

Abstract: This paper presents a novel cache replacement method — Popularity-Driven Content Caching (PopCaching). PopCaching learns the popularity of content and uses it to determine which content it should store and which it should evict from the cache. Popularity is learned in an online fashion, requires no training phase and hence, it is more responsive to continuously changing trends of content popularity. We prove that the learning regret of PopCaching (i.e., the gap between the hit rate achieved by PopCaching and that by the optimal caching policy with hindsight) is sublinear in the number of content requests. Therefore, PopCaching converges fast and asymptotically achieves the optimal cache hit rate. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of PopCaching by applying it to a movie.douban.com dataset that contains over 38 million requests. Our results show significant cache hit rate lift compared to existing algorithms, and the improvements can exceed 40% when the cache capacity is limited. In addition, PopCaching has low complexity.

Coded caching with nonuniform demands

Abstract: We consider a network consisting of a file server connected through a shared link to a number of users, each equipped with a cache. Knowing the popularity distribution of the files, the goal is to optimally populate the caches, such as to minimize the expected load of the shared link. For a single cache, it is well known that storing the most popular files is optimal in this setting. However, we show here that this is no longer the case for multiple caches. Indeed, caching only the most popular files can be highly suboptimal. Instead, a fundamentally different approach is needed, in which the cache contents are used as side information for coded communication over the shared link. We propose such a coded caching scheme and prove that it is close to optimal.