Parallel Performance Project Research Paper

Research Paper

Active Management of Data Caches by Exploiting Reuse Information
Edward S. Tam, Jude A. Rivers, Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan, Gary S. Tyson, and Edward S. Davidson
IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 48, No. 11, pp. 1244 - 1259, November 1999.

Abstract

As microprocessor speeds continue to outpace memory subsystems in speed, minimizing average data access time grows in importance. Multi-lateral caches afford an opportunity to reduce the average data access time by active management of block allocation and replacement decisions. We evaluate and compare the performance of traditional caches and multi-lateral caches with three active block allocation schemes: MAT, NTS, and PCS.

We also compare the performance of NTS and PCS to multi-lateral caches with a near-optimal, but nonimplementable policy, pseudo-opt, that employs future knowledge to achieve both active allocation and active replacement. NTS and PCS are evaluated relative to pseudo-opt with respect to miss ratio, accuracy of predicting reference locality, actual usage accuracy, and tour lengths of blocks in the cache. Results show the multi-lateral schemes do outperform traditional cache management schemes, but fall short of pseudo-opt; increasing their prediction accuracy and incorporating active replacement decisions would allow them to more closely approach pseudo-opt performance.