Adaptive Writeback-aware Cache Management Policy for Lifetime Extension of Non-volatile Memory

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Adaptive Writeback-aware Cache management (AWC) to prolong the lifetime of non-volatile main memory systems by reducing the number of writebacks. The last-level cache in AWC is partitioned into Least Recently Used (LRU) segment and LRU using Dirty block Precedence (DP-LRU) segment. The DP-LRU segment evicts clean blocks first for giving reuse opportunity to dirty blocks. AWC can also determine the efficient size of DP-LRU segment for reducing the number of writebacks according to memory access patterns of programs. In the performance evaluation, we showed that AWC reduced the number of writebacks up to 29% and 46%, and saved the energy of a main memory system up to 23% and 49% in a single-core and multi-core, respectively. AWC also reduced the runtime by 1.5% and 3.2% on average compared to previous cache managements for nonvolatile main memory systems, in a single-core and a multi-core, respectively.