A cache partitioning mechanism to protect shared data for CMPs

Abstract

The last-level cache (LLC) of a modern chip-multiprocessor (CMP) keeps two kinds of data: shared data accessed by multiple cores and private data accessed by only one core. Although the former are likely to have a larger performance impact than the latter, the LLC manages both of those data in the same fashion. To realize a highly efficient execution on a CMP, this paper proposes a cache partitioning mechanism to protect shared data from excessive eviction. The evaluation results show that the proposed mechanism improves the performance by up to 76% and by 8% on average at a cost of less than 2% of the LLC hardware.