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DEAM: Decoupled, Expressive, Area-Efficient Metadata Cache

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Abstract

Chip multiprocessor presents brand new opportunities for holistic on-chip data and coherence management solutions. An intelligent protocol should be adaptive to the fine-grain accessing behavior. And in terms of storage of metadata, the size of conventional directory grows as the square of the number of processors, making it very expensive in large-scale systems. In this paper, we propose a metadata cache framework to achieve three goals: 1) reducing the latency of data access and coherence activities, 2) saving the storage of metadata, and 3) providing support for other optimization techniques. The metadata is implemented with compact structures and tracks the dynamically changing access pattern. The pattern information is used to guide the delegation and replication of decoupled data and metadata to allow fast access. We also use our metadata cache as a building block to enhance stream prefetching. Using detailed execution-driven simulation, we demonstrate that our protocol achieves an average speedup of 1.12X compared with a shared cache protocol with 1/5 of the storage of metadata.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Peng Liu & Lei Fang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Wuxi, 214125, China

    Peng Liu

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627-0231, U.S.A.

    Michael C. Huang

Authors
  1. Peng Liu
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  2. Lei Fang
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  3. Michael C. Huang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peng Liu.

Additional information

The work is supported by the Joint Research Fund for Overseas Chinese Scholars and Scholars in Hong Kong and Macao of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61028004, and the Open Project Program of the State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing under Grant No. 2014A08.

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Liu, P., Fang, L. & Huang, M.C. DEAM: Decoupled, Expressive, Area-Efficient Metadata Cache. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 29, 679–691 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-014-1459-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-014-1459-0

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