Latency reduction techniques in chip multiprocessor cache systems

Single-chip multiprocessors (CMPs) solve several bottlenecks facing chip designers today. Compared to traditional superscalars, CMPs deliver higher performance at lower power for thread-parallel workloads. In this thesis, we consider tiled CMPs, a class of CMPs where each tile contains a slice of the total on-chip L2 cache storage, and tiles are connected by an on-chip network. Two basic schemes are currently used to manage L2 slices. First, each slice can be used as a private L2 for the tile. Private L2 caches provide the lowest hit latency but reduce the total effective cache capacity because each tile creates a local copy of any block it touches. Second, all slices are aggregated to form a single large L2 shared by all tiles. A shared L2 cache increases the effective cache capacity for shared data, but incurs longer hit latencies when L2 data is on a remote tile. In practice, either private or shared works better for a given workload. We present two new policies, victim replication and victim migration, both of which combine the advantages of private and shared designs. They are variants of the shared scheme which attempt to keep copies of local L1 cache victims within the local L2 cache slice.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Michael Ruogu, 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Krste Asanović.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36183

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36183