HyCSim: A rapid design space exploration tool for emerging hybrid last-level caches

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rising trend in the exploration of nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies in the memory subsystem. Particularly in the cache hierarchy, hybrid last-level cache (LLC) solutions are proposed to meet the wide-ranging performance and energy requirements of modern days applications. These emerging hybrid solutions need simulation and detailed exploration to fully understand their capabilities before exploiting them. Existing simulation tools are either too slow or incapable of prototyping such systems and optimizing for NVM devices. To this end, we propose HyCSim1, a trace-driven simulation infrastructure that enables rapid comparison of various hybrid LLC configurations for different optimization objectives. Notably, HyCSim makes it possible to quickly estimate the impact of various hybrid LLC insertion and replacement policies, disabling of a cache region at byte or cache frame granularity for different fault maps. In addition, HyCSim allows to evaluate the impact of various compression schemes on the overall performance (hit and miss rate) and the number of writes to the LLC. Our evaluation on ten multi-program workloads from the SPEC 2006 benchmarks suite shows that HyCSim accelerates the simulation time by 24 ×, compared to the cycle-Accurate Gem5 simulator, with high-fidelity.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of System Engineering for Constrained Embedded Systems - DroneSE
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages53-58
Number of pages6
ISBN (electronic)9781450395663
Publication statusPublished - 17 Jan 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesRAPIDO: Rapid Simulation and Performance Evaluation: Methods and Tools

Conference

Title2022 Workshop on System Engineering for Constrained Embedded Systems - Drone Systems Engineering and Rapid Simulation and Performance Evaluation: Methods and Tools, DroneSE and RAPIDO 2022 - Presented at HiPEAC 2022 Conference
Duration20 - 22 June 2022
CityBudapest
CountryHungary

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5007-445X/work/160049131

Keywords

Keywords

  • emerging architecture., hybrid last-level caches (LLCs), NVMs, prototyping, rapid simulation