RExCache: Rapid exploration of unified last-level cache

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to explore design space of a unified last-level cache to improve system performance and energy efficiency. The challenge is to quickly estimate the execution time and energy consumption of the system with distinct cache configurations using minimal number of slow full-system cycle-accurate simulations. To this end, we propose a novel, simple yet highly accurate execution time estimator and a simple, reasonably accurate energy estimator. Our framework, RExCache, combines a cycle-accurate simulator and a trace-driven cache simulator with our novel execution time estimator and energy estimator to avoid cycle-accurate simulations of all the last-level cache configurations. Once execution time and energy estimates are available from the estimators, RExCache chooses minimum execution time or minimum energy consumption cache configuration. Our experiments with nine different applications from mediabench, and 330 last-level cache configurations show that the execution time and energy estimators had at least average absolute accuracy of 99.74% and 80.31% respectively. RExCache took only a few hours (21 hours for H.264enc) to explore last-level cache configurations compared to several days of traditional method (36 days for H.264enc) and cycle-accurate simulations (257 days for H.264enc), enabling quick exploration of the last-level cache. When 100 different real-time constraints on execution time and energy were used, all the cache configurations found by RExCache were similar to those from cycle-accurate simulations. On the other hand, the traditional method found correct cache configurations for only 69 out of 100 constraints. Thus, RExCache has better absolute accuracy than the traditional method, yet reducing the simulation time by at least 97%.