BACH: A Bandwidth-Aware Hybrid Cache Hierarchy Design with Nonvolatile Memories

Abstract

Limited main memory bandwidth is becoming a fundamental performance bottleneck in chipmultiprocessor (CMP) design. Yet directly increasing the peak memory bandwidth can incur high cost and power consumption. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a memory, a bandwidth-aware reconfigurable cache hierarchy, BACH, with hybrid memory technologies. Components of our BACH design include a hybrid cache hierarchy, a reconfiguration mechanism, and a statistical prediction engine. Our hybrid cache hierarchy chooses different memory technologies with various bandwidth characteristics, such as spin-transfer torque memory (STT-MRAM), resistive memory (ReRAM), and embedded DRAM (eDRAM), to configure each level so that the peak bandwidth of the overall cache hierarchy is optimized. Our reconfiguration mechanism can dynamically adjust the cache capacity of each level based on the predicted bandwidth demands of running workloads. The bandwidth prediction is performed by our prediction engine. We evaluate the system performance gain obtained by BACH design with a set of multithreaded and multiprogrammed workloads with and without the limitation of system power budget. Compared with traditional SRAM-based cache design, BACH improves the system throughput by 58% and 14% with multithreaded and multiprogrammed workloads respectively.