RACMan: Replication-aware cache management for manycore CMPs with private LLCs

Abstract

The last level cache (LLC) in private configurations offer lower latency and isolation but extinguishes the possibility of sharing underutilized cache resources. Cooperative Caching (CC) provides capacity sharing by spilling a line evicted from one cache to another. However, CC proposals did not pay enough attention to the natural problem of private LLC, replication. The static policies either indulging the replicated blocks (replicas) in or excluding them out of LLC invariably are deficient for the complex cache capacity situations in manycore environment. In this paper, we present replication-aware cache management (RACMan) to optimize replication for private configurations. RACMan relies on a novel coarse-grained low-overheard mechanism PBFP that monitors and predicts the replica reusability to dynamically adjust LLC insertion policies giving replicas different positions of LRU chain and chances of survival in LLC according to the prediction. Experiment results show our proposal is competent to optimize replication by performing better than two baseline systems in the respects of L2 Hit Rate, Network Traffics, IPC, and Dynamic Energy. RACMan fulfils the requirements of manycore CMPs with private LLC for increasing system performance, area efficiency, and scalability.