197 Reducing Cache Contention of L2 Shared Cache on Multi-Core Processor Architecture

The multi-level cache hierarchy has long been adopted in microprocessors to deal with the memory wall problem. Nevertheless, contention misses and data thrashing in the shared LLC may still hurt performance due to interference between multiple threads running on the same processor. Based on application's temporal reuse behavior, we propose a Reuse Frequency based Filter (RFF) algorithm to select possible reused data from replaced data, reducing harmful displacement of useful data and data thrashing of the shared LLC on a chip Multi-Processor (CMP) architecture. Our simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively reduce harmful replacements and cache conflicts by 19.7% and increase IPC of programs by 1.68% on average.