A Weighted Dynamic Shared Cache Partitioning Mechanism for Multi-Threaded Multi-Programmed Workloads

In a chip-multiprocessor with a shared cache structure,the competing accesses from different applications degrade the system performance,resulting in non-optimal performance and non-predicting executing time.Cache partitioning techniques,a promising solution of the above problems,can exclusively partition the shared cache among multiple competing applications.Processes with different number of threads have different utility on shared cache.However,traditional cache partitioning mechanism,Utility-based Cache Partition(UCP) for example,is to lower the average miss rate of shared cache,regardless of the different thread number of different applications.In this paper,the authors design the framework of Weighted Cache Partitioning,a dynamic shared cache partitioning mechanism to improve the performance of multi-threaded multi-programmed workloads.The framework includes a miss rate monitor,called Application-oriented Miss Rate Monitor(AMRM),which dynamically collects miss rate information of multiple multi-threaded applications on different cache partitions,and weighted cache partitioning algorithm,which extends traditional miss rate oriented cache partition algorithms by adding power coefficient for applications based on their thread number.So the applications with more threads tend to get more shared cache in order to improve the overall system performance.Experiments show that although WCP has higher miss rate compared with miss rate oriented cache partition algorithm,it has better IPC throughput,weighted speedup and fairness.Specifically,for multi-threaded multi-programmed scientific computing workloads,WCP-1 improves throughput by up to 10.8% and on average 5.5% over miss rate oriented algorithm.