Design space exploration of non-uniform cache access for soft-error vulnerability mitigation

Abstract

In this paper, the design space exploration problem is concerned with finding the best composition of different Non-Uniform Cache Access (NUCA) specifications in many-core processors. The single-objective and multi-objective exploration problems are intended to meet the desired level of reliability without violating the performance and energy constraints. The main objective is to find the best choice for each cache specification which can minimize the vulnerability of L1 and L2 caches in NUCA architectures. The design space consists of 72 implementations, made up of combinations of different structures in the current NUCA specifications (cache organization, write policy, coherence protocol, inclusiveness, replacement policy, and network topology). Moreover, the effects of design implementations on reliability (as the main objective), performance, cache energy consumption, and interconnection traffic (as the constraints) have been investigated.