Replacement Policy Adaptable Miss Curve Estimation for Efficient Cache Partitioning

Abstract

Cache replacement policies and cache partitioning are well-known cache management techniques which aim to eliminate inter- and intra-application contention caused by co-running applications, respectively. Since replacement policies can change applications’ behavior on a shared last-level cache, they have a massive impact on cache partitioning. Furthermore, cache partitioning determines the capacity allocated to each application affecting incorporated replacement policy. However, their interoperability has not been thoroughly explored. Since existing cache partitioning methods are tailored to specific replacement policies to reduce overheads for characterization of applications’ behavior, they may lead to suboptimal partitioning results when incorporated with the up-to-date replacement policies. In cache partitioning, miss curve estimation is a key component to relax this restriction which can reflect the dependency between a replacement policy and cache partitioning on partitioning decision. To tackle this issue, we propose a replacement policy adaptable miss curve estimation (RME) which estimates dynamic workload patterns according to any arbitrary replacement policy and to given applications with low overhead. In addition, RME considers asymmetry of miss latency by miss type, thus the impact of miss curve on cache partitioning can be reflected more accurately. The experimental results support the efficiency of RME and show that RME-based cache partitioning cooperated with high-performance replacement policies can minimize both inter- and intra-application interference successfully.