Exploring a Hybrid Voting-based Eviction Policy for Caches and Sparse Directories on Manycore Architectures

Abstract

In manycore systems, eviction decisions related to caches and memory coherence greatly impact system performance, thereby emphasizing their importance. Extensive research has produced numerous standalone eviction policies such as LRU, LFU, FIFO, etc. all aiming to attain the Bélády optimum solution. Standalone eviction policies optimize for a single attribute (recency, frequency, etc.), limiting their impact on applications exhibiting non-uniform memory access patterns. The Hybrid Voting-based Eviction Policy (HyVE) extends multiple standalone eviction policies with a ranking system and evaluates them using concepts from the voting theory domain. The goal of HyVE is to make better replacement decisions by creating a consensus among its constituent eviction policies. With its inherent voting properties, HyVE takes different replacement decisions compared to its standalone counterparts, making it a unique and new eviction policy. We deploy and evaluate HyVE as part of two case-studies: last-level cache replacement decisions in a generic manycore environment, and sparse directory eviction decisions on a tile-based distributed shared memory (DSM) architecture. We explore different variants of HyVE, and evaluate them using workloads from the PARSEC and SPLASH-2 benchmark suites in a simulation environment. We also compare HyVE to state-of-the-art set-dueling and learning-based eviction policies. For last-level cache replacement decisions, HyVE reduces cache misses by 7.4% compared to the LRU policy, whereas DRRIP and Hawkeye reduce cache misses by 5.5% and 9.2% respectively compared to the LRU policy. Though Hawkeye exhibits better performance on average, HyVE offers a unique advantage for certain workloads by using a voting-based approach to solve the replacement problem. For sparse directory eviction decisions, results show that HyVE reduces coherence traffic and execution time by up to 11% compared to the LRU policy. We have synthesized HyVE on an FPGA prototype. Hardware analysis results show that HyVE’s constituent policies contribute the most to its overheads, while HyVE’s ranking and voting extensions do not add significant overheads. Timing analysis results show that HyVE’s logic delay is comparable to that of standalone eviction policies. Lastly, we evaluate HyVE on the FPGA prototype using characteristic micro-benchmarks that further emphasize HyVE’s ability to remain agnostic to varying data access patterns.