A Novel Scheme to Balance the Cache Sharing in High Performance Computing System

Caching is an important technique to improve the performance of computer systems, especially for high performance computing systems. In traditional n-way set associative cache scheme, all sets have the same number of blocks. The blocks in a set cannot be used by other sets, resulting in inefficient cache utility for most applications with non-uniform cache access patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel cache sharing method, called the Way-Level Share Cache structure (WLSC), to enhance the caching performance by balancing the cache sharing. In addition to retaining the major properties of the traditional method, our method allows the blocks in some sets to be used by other sets and it can be done dynamically in the running processes. It can adapt to different applications. Simulation indicates that the proposed method can greatly increase the hit rate and thus improve the caching performance in the systems.