Emulating Optimal Replacement with a Shepherd Cache

Rajan, Kaushik and Ramaswamy, Govindarajan (2007) Emulating Optimal Replacement with a Shepherd Cache. In: MICRO 40 Proceedings of the 40th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Washington, DC.

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Abstract

The inherent temporal locality in memory accesses is filtered out by the L1 cache. As a consequence, an L2 cache with LRU replacement incurs significantly higher misses than the optimal replacement policy (OPT). We propose to narrow this gap through a novel replacement strategy that mimics the replacement decisions of OPT. The L2 cache is logically divided into two components, a Shepherd Cache (SC) with a simple FIFO replacement and a Main Cache (MC) with an emulation of optimal replacement. The SC plays the dual role of caching lines and guiding the replacement decisions in MC. Our pro- posed organization can cover 40% of the gap between OPT and LRU for a 2MB cache resulting in 7% overall speedup. Comparison with the dynamic insertion policy, a victim buffer, a V-Way cache and an LRU based fully associative cache demonstrates that our scheme performs better than all these strategies.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publisher:	ACM Press
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to ACM Press.
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences > Supercomputer Education & Research Centre
Date Deposited:	19 Oct 2011 07:04
Last Modified:	19 Oct 2011 07:04
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/41520

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