Cache Optimization for Memory Intensive Workloads on Multi-socket Multi-core servers

Abstract: Major chip manufacturers have all introduced multicore microprocessors. Multi-socket systems built from these processors are used for running various server applications. Depending on the application that is run on the system, remote memory accesses can impact overall performance. This paper presents a cache optimization that can cut down remote DRAM accesses. By keeping track of remote cache lines loaded from remote DRAM and by biasing the cache replacement policy towards such remote DRAM cache lines the number of cache misses are reduced. This in turn results in improvement of overall performance. I present the design details in this paper. I do a qualitative comparison of various solutions to the problem of performance impact of remote DRAM accesses. This work can be extended by doing a quantitative evaluation and by further refining cache optimization.