• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.18 no.11
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• pp.1-12
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• 2013

In multi-core processors, Last Level Cache(LLC) can reduce the speed gap between the memory and the core. For this reason, LLC has big impact on the performance of processors. LLC is composed of shared cache and private cache. In computer architecture community, most researchers have mainly focused on the management techniques for shared cache, while management techniques for private cache have not been widely researched. In conventional private LLC, memory is statically assigned to each core, resulting in serious performance degradation when the workloads are not fairly distributed. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes the replacement policy for managing private cache of LLC efficiently. As proposed core-aware cache replacement policy can reconfigure LLC dynamically, hit rate of LLC is increases drastically. Moreover, proposed policy uses 2-bit saturating counters to improve the performance. According to our simulation results, the proposed method can improve hit rates by 9.23% and reduce the access time by 12.85% compared to the conventional method.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.871-877
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• 2014

Cache replacement algorithms have been developed in order to reduce miss counts. In modern processors, the performance gap between the processor and main memory has been increasing, creating a more important role for cache replacement policies. The Least Recently Used (LRU) policy is one of the most common policies used in modern processors. However, recent research has shown that the performance gap between the LRU and the theoretical optimal replacement algorithm (OPT) is large. Although LRU replacement has been proven to be adequate over and over again, the OPT/LRU performance gap is continuously widening as the cache associativity becomes large. In this study, we observed that there is a potential chance to improve cache performance based on existing LRU mechanisms. We propose a method that enhances the performance of the LRU replacement algorithm based on the access proportion among the lines in a cache set during a period of two successive replacement actions that make the final replacement action. Our experimental results reveals that the proposed method reduced the average miss rate of the baseline 512KB L2 cache by 15 percent when compared to conventional LRU. In addition, the performance of the processor that applied our proposed cache replacement policy improved by 4.7 percent over LRU, on average.