A capacity-efficient insertion policy for dynamic cache resizing mechanisms

Dynamic cache resizing mechanisms have been proposed to achieve both high performance and low energy consumption. The basic idea behind such mechanisms is to divide a cache into some parts, and manage them independently to resize the cache for resource allocation and energy saving. However, dynamic cache resizing mechanisms waste their resource to store a lot of dead-on-fill blocks, which are not reused after being stored in the cache. To reduce the number of dead-on-fill blocks in the cache and thus improve energy efficiency of dynamic cache resizing mechanisms, this paper proposes a dynamic LRU-K insertion policy. The policy stores a new coming block as the K-th least-recently-used one and adjusts K dynamically according to the application to be executed. Therefore, the policy can balance between early eviction of dead-on-fill blocks and retainment of reusable blocks.