Dynamic Techniques for Mitigating Inter- and Intra-Application Cache Interference

Given the emerging dominance of chip-multiprocessor (CMP) systems, an important research problem concerns application memory performance in the face of deep mem-ory hierarchies, where one or more caches are shared by multiple cores. Often, when several applications compete for capacity in shared caches, the performance of multi-programmed and parallel workloads degrades significantly and becomes unpredictable. This happens because the commonly-used Least-Recently-Used replacement policy does not distinguish between processes and their distinct memory needs. Therefore, processes often suffer from such inter-application cache interference and the overall system throughput can be slowed down by as much as 55%. In addition to managing multiple applications sharing the last-level cache (LLC), managing a single application’s memory performance is far from straightforward even in an idealized setup, considering only user accesses. It becomes even more challeng-ing in real-machine environments, where interference can stem from operating system (OS) activities, and even from an application’s own prefetch requests and page tabl