An application classification guided cache tuning heuristic for multi-core architectures

Since multi-core architectures are becoming more popular, recent multi-core optimizations focus on energy consumption. We present a level one data cache tuning heuristic for a heterogeneous multi-core system, which classifies applications based on data sharing and cache behavior, and uses this classification to guide cache tuning and reduce the number of cores that need to be tuned. Results reveal average energy savings of 25% for 2-, 4-, 8-, and 16-core systems while searching only 1% of the design space.