Proactive Use of Shared L3 Caches to Enhance Cache Communications in Multi-Core Processors |
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Authors: | Fide Sevin Jenks Stephen |
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Affiliation: | University of California, Irvine; |
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Abstract: | The software and hardware techniques to exploit the potential of multi-core processors are falling behind, even though the number of cores and cache levels per chip is increasing rapidly. There is no explicit communications support available, and hence inter-core communications depend on cache coherence protocols, resulting in demand-based cache line transfers with their inherent latency and overhead. In this paper, we present Software Controlled Eviction (SCE) to improve the performance of multithreaded applications running on multi-core processors by moving shared data to shared cache levels before it is demanded from remote private caches. Simulation results show that SCE offers significant performance improvement (8-28%) and reduces L3 cache misses by 88-98%. |
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