The Application Of Skewed-Associative Memories To Cache Only Memory Architectures

Skewed-associative caches use several hash functions to reduce collisions in caches without increasing the associativity. This technique can increase the hit ratio of a cache without significantly increasing the cost. In this paper we apply skewing to solve a problem particular to virtual shared memory architectures that are designed using only associative memories. When using ordinary setassociative memories the replication of data amongst many nodes leads to a reduced storage capacity in a specific set. Using skewing can alleviate this problem. Our results show improvement in the majority of cases. 1 INTRODUCTION Associative memories can contain arbitrary sets of data because the address of each datum is stored along with the data itself. These structures are particularly useful when a memory needs to be able to store a selection of data from a much larger address space, for example in a cache. Unfortunately, the flexibility of associative memory requires that each lookup searches ..