CONTROLLING CACHE PARTITIONSIZES TO INCREASE APPLICATIONRELIABILITY

A problem with multi-core platforms is the competition of shared cache memory which is also knownas cache contention. Cache contention can negatively affect process reliability, since it can increaseexecution time jitter. Cache contention may be caused by inter-process interference in a system.To minimize the negative effects of inter-process interference, cache memory can be partitionedwhich would isolate processes from each other.In this work, two questions related to cache-coloring based cache partition sizes have been inves-tigated. The first question is how we can use knowledge of execution characteristics of an algorithmto create adequate partition sizes. The second question is to investigate if sweet spots can be foundto determine when cache-coloring based cache partitioning is worth using. The investigation ofthe two questions is conducted using two experiments. The first experiment put focus on howstatic partition sizes affect process reliability and isolation. The second experiment investigatesboth questions by using L3 cache misses caused by a running process to determine partition sizesdynamically.Results from the first experiment shows static partition sizes to increase process reliability andisolation compared to a non-isolated system. The second experiment outcomes shows the dynamicpartition sizes to provide even better process reliability compared to the static approach. Collectively,all results have been fairly identical and therefore sweets spots could not be found. Contributionsfrom our work is a cache partitioning controller and metrics showing the effects of static and dy-namic partitions sizes