Back to the Future: Leveraging Belady's Algorithm for Improved Cache Replacement

Abstract

Belady's algorithm is optimal but infeasible because it requires knowledge of the future. This paper explains how a cache replacement algorithm can nonetheless learn from Belady's algorithm by applying it to past cache accesses to inform future cache replacement decisions. We show that the implementation is surprisingly efficient, as we introduce a new method of efficiently simulating Belady's behavior, and we use known sampling techniques to compactly represent the long history information that is needed for high accuracy. For a 2MB LLC, our solution uses a 16KB hardware budget (excluding replacement state in the tag array). When applied to a memory-intensive subset of the SPEC 2006 CPU benchmarks, our solution improves performance over LRU by 8.4%, as opposed to 6.2% for the previous state-of-the-art. For a 4-core system with a shared 8MB LLC, our solution improves performance by 15.0%, compared to 12.0% for the previous state-of-the-art.