Designing Large Hybrid Cache for Future HPC Systems

Abstract

DRAM cache is a large cache stacked on the processors die using 3D-stacking technology, which may be used in the future High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems to reduce latency and increase bandwidth. However, the energy becomes an inevitable challenge with the increasing cache capacity. In this paper, we first propose a large hybrid cache for future HPC systems, which can effectively reduce the static energy compared with the DRAM cache. Further, we apply volatile STT-RAM as part of the hybrid cache to reduce both the static and dynamic energy of the DRAM cache. Finally, we propose to maintain the cache tag array in the region of the hybrid cache with less read latency to improve performance. Experimental results show our hybrid cache reduces energy by 31.6% and improves performance by 18.8% on average.