SEESAW: Using superpages to improve VIPT caches

Mayank Parasar, Abhishek Bhattacharjee, Tushar Krishna

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

Hardware caches balance fast lookup, high hit rates, energy efficiency, and simplicity of implementation. For L1 caches however, achieving this balance is difficult because of constraints imposed by virtual memory. L1 caches are usually virtually-indexed and physically tagged (VIPT), but this means that they must be highly associative to achieve good capacity. Unfortunately, excessive associativity compromises performance by degrading access times without significantly boosting hit rates, and increases access energy. We propose SEESAW to overcome this problem. SEESAW leverages the increasing ubiquity of superpages1 – since superpages have more page offset bits, they can accommodate VIPT caches with more sets than what is traditionally possible with only base page sizes. SEESAW dynamically reduces the number of ways that are looked up based on the page size, improving performance and energy. SEESAW requires modest hardware and no OS or application changes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2018 ACM/IEEE 45th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages193-206
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781538659847
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 19 2018
Event45th ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2018 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: Jun 2 2018Jun 6 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture
ISSN (Print)1063-6897

Other

Other45th ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period6/2/186/6/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • L1 caches
  • Memory systems
  • Superpages
  • Virtual memory

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