Courteous cache sharing: Being nice to others in capacity management

This paper proposes a cache management scheme for multiprogrammed, multithreaded applications, with the objective of obtaining maximum performance for both individual applications and the multithreaded workload mix. In this scheme, each individual application´s performance is improved by increasing the priority of its slowest thread, while the overall system performance is improved by ensuring that each individual application´s performance benefit does not come at the cost of a significant degradation to other application´s threads that are sharing the same cache. Averaged over six workloads, our shared cache management scheme improves the performance of the combination of applications by 18%. These improvements across applications in each mix are also fair, as indicated by average fair speedup improvements of 10% across the threads of each application (averaged over all the workloads).