Premier: A Concurrency-Aware Pseudo-Partitioning Framework for Shared Last-Level Cache

Abstract

As the number of on-chip cores and application demands increase, efficient management of shared cache resources becomes imperative. Cache partitioning techniques have been studied for decades to reduce interference between applications in a shared cache and provide performance and fairness guarantees. However, there are few studies on how concurrent memory accesses affect the effectiveness of partitioning. When concurrent memory requests exist, cache miss does not reflect concurrency overlapping well. In this work, we first introduce pure misses per kilo instructions (PMPKI), a metric that quantifies the cache efficiency considering concurrent access activities. Then we propose Premier, a dynamically adaptive concurrency-aware cache pseudo-partitioning framework. Premier provides insertion and promotion policies based on PMPKI curves to achieve the benefits of cache partitioning. Finally, our evaluation of various workloads shows that Premier outperforms state-of-the-art cache partitioning schemes in terms of performance and fairness. In an 8-core system, Premier achieves 15.45% higher system performance and 10.91% better fairness than the UCP scheme.