A Skewed Multi-banked Cache for Many-core Vector Processors

As the number of cores and the memory bandwidth have increased in a balanced fashion, modern vector processors achieve high sustained performances, especially in memory-intensive applications in the fields of science and engineering. However, it is difficult to significantly increase the off-chip memory bandwidth owing to the limitation of the number of input/output pins integrated on a single chip. Under the circumstances, modern vector processors have adopted a shared cache to realize a high sustained memory bandwidth. The shared cache can effectively reduce the pressure to the off-chip memory bandwidth by keeping reusable data that multiple vector cores require. However, as the number of vector cores sharing a cache increases, more different blocks requested from multiple cores simultaneously use the same set. As a result, conflict misses caused by these blocks degrade the performance. In order to avoid increasing the conflict misses in the case of the increasing number of cores, this paper proposes a skewed cache for many-core vector processors. The skewed cache prevents the simultaneously requested blocks from being stored into the same set. This paper discusses how the most important two features of the skewed cache should be implemented in modern vector processors: hashing function and replacement policy. The proposed cache adopts the oddmultiplier displacement hashing for effective skewing and the static re-reference interval prediction policy for reasonable replacing. The evaluation results show that the proposed cache significantly improves the performance of a many-core vector processor by eliminating conflict misses.