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Enhancing Last-Level Cache Performance by Block Bypassing and Early Miss Determination

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Advances in Computer Systems Architecture (ACSAC 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4186))

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Abstract

While bypassing algorithms have been applied to the first-level cache, we study for the first time their effectiveness for the last-level caches for which miss penalties are significantly higher and where algorithm complexity is not constrained by the speed of the pipeline. Our algorithm monitors the reuse behavior of blocks that are touched by delinquent loads and re-classify them on-the-fly. Blocks classified as bypassed are only installed in the level-1 cache. We leverage the algorithm to early send out a miss request for loads expected to request blocks classified to be bypassed. Such requests are sent to memory directly without tag checks at intermediary levels in the cache hierarchy. Overall, we find that we can robustly reduce the miss rate by 23% and improve IPC with 14% on average for memory bound SPEC2000 applications without degrading performance of the other SPEC2000 applications.

This work is partly sponsored by the HiPEAC Network of Excellence funded by EU under FP6.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Haakon Dybdahl

  2. Dept. of Computer Engineering, Dept. of Computer Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, S-412 96, Goteborg, Sweden

    Per Stenström

Authors
  1. Haakon Dybdahl
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  2. Per Stenström
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Systems Architecture Group, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Chris Jesshope

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, AL10 9AB, Hatfield, UK

    Colin Egan

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dybdahl, H., Stenström, P. (2006). Enhancing Last-Level Cache Performance by Block Bypassing and Early Miss Determination. In: Jesshope, C., Egan, C. (eds) Advances in Computer Systems Architecture. ACSAC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4186. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11859802_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11859802_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40056-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40058-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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