• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.188-193
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• 2022

The energy efficiency of memory systems is an important task in designing future computer systems as memory capacity continues to increase to accommodate the growing big data. In this article, we present an energy-efficient last-level cache management policy for future mobile systems. The proposed policy makes use of low-power PCM (phase-change memory) as the main memory medium, and reduces the amount of data written to PCM, thereby saving memory energy consumptions. To do so, the policy keeps track of the modified cache lines within each cache block, and replaces the last-level cache block that incurs the smallest PCM writing upon cache replacement requests. Also, the policy considers the access bit of cache blocks along with the cache line modifications in order not to degrade the cache hit ratio. Simulation experiments using SPEC benchmarks show that the proposed policy reduces the power consumption of PCM memory by 22.7% on average without degrading performances.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.104-108
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• 2021

In order to improve performance in IoT, edge computing system, a memory is usually configured in a hierarchical structure. Based on the distance from CPU, the access speed slows down in the order of registers, cache memory, main memory, and storage. Similar to the change in performance, energy consumption also increases as the distance from the CPU increases. Therefore, it is important to develop a technique that places frequently used data to the upper memory as much as possible to improve performance and energy consumption. However, the technique should solve the problem of cache performance degradation caused by lack of spatial locality that occurs when the data access stride is large. This study proposes a technique to selectively place data with large data access stride to a software-controlled cache. By using the proposed technique, data spatial locality can be improved by reducing the data access interval, and consequently, the cache performance can be improved.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.99-107
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• 2020

In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of mobile cache, which is used to improve the data access speed when executing applications on mobile devices, and verify the importance of mobile cache through a cache data access experiment. The mobile device market has grown at a fast pace over the past decade; however, battery limitations and size, price considerations restrict the usage of fast hardware. Thus, their performance are supplemented by using a memory buffer structure such as the cache memory. The analysis mainly focuses on cache size, hierarchical structure of cache, cache replacement policy, and the effect these features has on mobile performance. For the experimental data, we applied a data set from a microprocessor system study, originally used to test the cache performance. In the experimental results, the average data access speed on a mobile device showed a performance improvement of up to 10 times with the presence of cache memory than without. Accordingly, the cache memory was helpful for the performance improvement of a mobile device when the specifications were identical.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.353-359
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a high performance L1 cache structure for the high clock CPU. The proposed cache memory consists of three parts, i.e., a direct-mapped cache to support fast access time, a two-way set associative buffer to reduce miss ratio, and a way-select table. The most recently accessed data is stored in the direct-mapped cache. If a data has a high probability of a repeated reference, when the data is replaced from the direct-mapped cache, the data is stored into the two-way set associative buffer. For the high performance and fast access time, we propose an one way among two ways set associative buffer is selectively accessed based on the way-select table (WST). According to simulation results, access time can be reduced by about 7% and 40% comparing with a direct cache and Intel i7-6700 with two times more space respectively.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.80-90
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• 2016

Thanks to superior leakage energy efficiency compared to SRAM cells, STTRAM cells are considered as a promising alternative for a memory element in on-chip caches. However, the main disadvantage of STTRAM cells is high write energy and latency. In this paper, we propose a low-cost write filter (WF) cache which resides between the load/store queue and STTRAM-based L1 data cache. To maximize efficiency of the WF cache, the line allocation and access policies are optimized for reducing energy consumption of STTRAM-based L1 data cache. By efficiently filtering the write operations in the STTRAM-based L1 data cache, our proposed WF cache reduces energy consumption of the STTRAM-based L1 data cache by up to 43.0% compared to the case without the WF cache. In addition, thanks to the fast hit latency of the WF cache, it slightly improves performance by 0.2%.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.189-200
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• 2004

Recently Flash Memory which is small and low-powered is widely used as a storage of embedded system, because an embedded system requests portability and a fast response. To resolve a difference of access time between a storage and RAM, Linux is using disk caching which copies a part of file on disk into RAM. It is not also an exception on embedded system. A READ access-time of flash memory is similar to RAMs. So, when a process on an embedded system reads data, it is similar to the time to access cached data in RAM and to access directly data on a flash memory. On the embedded system using limited memory, using a disk cache is that wastes much time and memory spaces to manage it and can not reflects the characteristic of a flash memory. This paper proposes the regular file access of limited using a page cache in the file system based on a flash memory and reflects the characteristic of a flash memory. The proposed algorithm minimizes power consumption because access numbers of the RAM are reduced and doesn't waste a memory space because it accesses directly to a flash memory Therefore, the performance improvement of the system applying the proposed algorithm is expected.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.72-79
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose the data cache architecture with a write buffer for a 32bit asynchronous embedded processor. The data cache consists of CAM and data memory. It accelerates data up lood cycle between the processor and the main memory that improves processor performance. The proposed data cache has 8 KB cache memory. The cache uses the 4-way set associative mapping with line size of 4 words (16 bytes) and pseudo LRU replacement algorithm for data replacement in the memory. Dirty register and write buffer is used for write policy of the cache. The designed data cache is synthesized to a gate level design using $0.13-{\mu}m$ process. Its average hit rate is 94%. And the system performance has been improved by 46.53%. The proposed data cache with write buffer is very suitable for a 32-bit asynchronous processor.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.69-77
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• 2017

Recent GPUs have adopted cache memory to benefit general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) programs. However, unlike CPU programs, GPGPU programs typically have considerably less temporal/spatial locality. Moreover, the L1 data cache is used by many threads that access a data size typically considerably larger than the L1 cache, making it critical to bypass L1 data cache intelligently to enhance GPU cache performance. In this paper, we examine GPU cache access behavior and propose a simple hardware-based GPU cache bypassing method that can be applied to GPU applications without recompiling programs. Moreover, we introduce a hybrid method that integrates static profiling information and hardware-based bypassing to further enhance performance. Our experimental results reveal that hardware-based cache bypassing can boost performance for most benchmarks, and the hybrid method can achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art compiler-based bypassing with considerably less profiling cost.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.205-210
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• 2014

Cache based live migration method utilizes a cache, which is accessible to both side (remote and local), to reduce the virtual machine migration time, by transferring only irredundant data. However, address space layout randomization (ASLR) is proved to reduce the memory duplicate ratio between targeted migration memory and the migration cache. In this pager, we analyzed the behavior of ASLR to find out how it changes the physical memory contents of virtual machines. We found that among six virtual memory regions, only the modification to stack influences the page-level memory duplicate ratio. Experiments showed that: (1) the ASLR does not shift the heap region in sub-page level; (2) the stack reduces the duplicate page size among VMs which performed input replay around 40MB, when ASLR was enabled; (3) the size of memory pages, which can be reconstructed from the fresh booted up state, also reduces by about 60MB by ASLR. With those observations, when applying cache-based migration method, we can omit the stack region. While for other five regions, even a coarse page-level redundancy data detecting method can figure out most of the duplicate memory contents.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.41 no.7
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• pp.784-792
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• 1992

In this paper we design and implement a method for application programs to allow handling of large data files in DOS environment. In this method we use extended memory and hard disk as a data buffer. And we use a part of the conventional DOS memory as a buffer cache which allows the application program to use extended memory and hard disks transparently. Using buffer cache also allows us some speed improvement for the application program.