Cooperative partitioning: Energy-efficient cache partitioning for high-performance CMPs

K.T. Sundararajan, V. Porpodas, Timothy M. Jones, N.P. Topham, B. Franke

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Intelligently partitioning the last-level cache within a chip multiprocessor can bring significant performance improvements. Resources are given to the applications that can benefit most from them, restricting each core to a number of logical cache ways. However, although overall performance is increased, existing schemes fail to consider energy saving when making their partitioning decisions. This paper presents Cooperative Partitioning, a runtime partitioning scheme that reduces both dynamic and static energy while maintaining high performance. It works by enforcing cached data to be way-aligned, so that a way is owned by a single core at any time. Cores cooperate with each other to migrate ways between themselves after partitioning decisions have been made. Upon access to the cache, a core needs only to consult the ways that it owns to find its data, saving dynamic energy. Unused ways can be power-gated for static energy saving. We evaluate our approach on two-core and four-core systems, showing that we obtain average dynamic and static energy savings of 35% and 25% compared to a fixed partitioning scheme. In addition, Cooperative Partitioning maintains high performance while transferring ways five times faster than an existing state-of-the-art technique.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHigh Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2012 IEEE 18th International Symposium on
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages1-12
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4673-0825-0
ISBN (Print)978-1-4673-0827-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2012

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