A low-latency fine-grained dynamic shared cache management scheme for chip multi-processor

In order to utilize the shared last-level cache (LLC) in chip multi-processors (CMP) more efficiently, the partitioning of LLC resources among all cores should have the characteristics of low-latency for access, fine granularity for migration and simple hardware complexity for implementation. This paper proposes a dynamic LLC management scheme to achieve these goals. The proposed scheme migrates cache resources among different cores at the granularity of cache blocks, instead of ways. The quantity of victim cache blocks that each victim core can migrate to other target cores are related to an eviction probability, which are calculated according to the performance goal. Then the victim cache blocks for a target core is chosen from the nearest victim core who has non-zero eviction probability by introducing innovate E-Table structure in CMP. The eviction probabilities are updated periodically. With the help of E-Tables, the proposal achieves low-latency accesses by always keeping the required cache blocks near to the target cores. And fine granularity is guaranteed by maintaining an eviction probability for each core. In addition, only little additional hardware changes to traditional cache structure is required. Simulation results suggest significant performance improvements from 6.8% to 22.7% over related works.