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A Fully Associative Software-Managed Cache Design

Tuesday March 15, 2005
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:00 pm



Brian Gold
Carnegie Mellon University

Paper: Erik Hallnor and Steven Reinhardt, A Fully Associative Software-Managed Cache Design, ISCA-27, June 2000

Modern processors can retire thousands of instructions in the time it takes to access DRAM, and hence cache miss rates are tightly coupled to performance. With secondary cache sizes growing to multiple megabytes, this paper from ISCA 2000 examines a software-managed cache design that provides intelligent replacement policies in a fully-associative secondary cache. This paper made two primary contributions: the design of a fully-associative structure called an indirect index cache (IIC), and a replacement algorithm called "generational replacement" that is designed to improve miss rates in an IIC. Using a trace-based evaluation of various desktop and commercial workloads, the authors show that IIC with generational replacement reduced the miss rate by 8% to 85% when compared to a 4-way design with LRU replacement.

In this talk, I will review the contributions of the IIC paper and discuss what the last five years have taught us about the challenges of large cache design.


Brian Gold is a 2nd year PhD student in the ECE department, working for Babak Falsafi on the TRUSS (Total Reliability Using Scalable Servers) project. His research interests are in reliable, high-performance architectures for commercial workloads. He spends his remaining time and stipend feeding Josie, the great dane.

 

Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringCarnegie Mellon UniversitySchool of Computer Science