Analytical Miss Rate Calculation of L2 Cache from the RD Profile of L1 Cache

Abstract

Reuse distance is an important metric for analytical estimation of cache miss rate. To find the miss rate of a particular cache, the reuse distance profile has to be measured for that particular level and configuration of the cache. Significant amount of simulation time and overhead can be reduced if we can find the miss rate of higher level cache like L2 cache from the RD profile with respect to a lower level cache (i.e., cache that is closer to the processor) such as L1. The objective of this paper is to give an analytical method to find the miss rate of L2 cache for various configurations from the RD profile with respect to L1 cache. We consider all three types of cache inclusion policies namely (i) Strictly Inclusive, (ii) Mutually Exclusive and (iii) Non-Inclusive Non-Exclusive policy. We first prove some general results relating the RD profile of L1 cache to that of L2 cache. We use probabilistic analysis for our derivations. We validate our model against simulations, using the multi-core simulator Sniper with the PARSEC and the SPLASH benchmark suites.