Talus: A simple way to remove cliffs in cache performance

Abstract

Caches often suffer from performance cliffs: minor changes in program behavior or available cache space cause large changes in miss rate. Cliffs hurt performance and complicate cache management. We present Talus,1 a simple scheme that removes these cliffs. Talus works by dividing a single application's access stream into two partitions, unlike prior work that partitions among competing applications. By controlling the sizes of these partitions, Talus ensures that as an application is given more cache space, its miss rate decreases in a convex fashion. We prove that Talus removes performance cliffs, and evaluate it through extensive simulation. Talus adds negligible overheads, improves single-application performance, simplifies partitioning algorithms, and makes cache partitioning more effective and fair.