A Self-Reconfiguring Cache Architecture to Improve Control Quality in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Quality of control is a critical concern in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) which are comprised of multiple intercommunicating control applications. Due to complex timing behaviour of these systems, poor quality of control can lead to catastrophe. Recent studies showed that, conflict miss increment in the processor cache memory shared by concurrently running control applications can degrade control quality in CPS significantly. Increasing cache associativity can help to reduce conflict misses. However, the existing reconfigurable cache architectures that allow runtime modification of cache associativity are not capable to guaranty a newly chosen associativity's suitability for the forthcoming control quality requirement. Moreover, they have timing and energy related overheads. In this regard, this paper presents a novel, self-reconfiguring cache memory architecture "SeReMo". When conflict misses increase significantly, SeReMo reconfigures its associativity to better suit the current as well as future control quality demand. To trigger reconfiguration, a low overhead, non-strictly inclusive cache hierarchy-specific approach is used. Configurations with different associativity are generated using modules made of 4 cache lines and 7 special bits. Special replacement policy and indexing scheme are used to suit modular reconfiguration. SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark trace-driven simulation reveals that SeReMo reduces average number of conflict misses per line to 1/12951 of the state-of-the-art reconfigurable cache architecture at maximum (to 1/830 on average). As a result, execution time and energy consumption reduce by 48 hours at maximum (by 2/3 on average) and by 2907 Joules at maximum (86% on average) respectively.