The locality-aware adaptive cache coherence protocol

Abstract

Next generation multicore applications will process massive amounts of data with significant sharing. Data movement and management impacts memory access latency and consumes power. Therefore, harnessing data locality is of fundamental importance in future processors. We propose a scalable, efficient shared memory cache coherence protocol that enables seamless adaptation between private and logically shared caching of on-chip data at the fine granularity of cache lines. Our data-centric approach relies on in-hardware yet low-overhead runtime profiling of the locality of each cache line and only allows private caching for data blocks with high spatio-temporal locality. This allows us to better exploit the private caches and enable low-latency, low-energy memory access, while retaining the convenience of shared memory. On a set of parallel benchmarks, our low-overhead locality-aware mechanisms reduce the overall energy by 25% and completion time by 15% in an NoC-based multicore with the Reactive-NUCA on-chip cache organization and the ACKwise limited directory-based coherence protocol.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jun 23, 2013
Source ID
10.1145/2508148.2485967

Entities

People

  • George Kurian
  • Omer Khan
  • Srinivas Devadas

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • University of Connecticut

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.