COOPERATIVE HARDWARE/SOFTWARE CACHING FOR Next-Generation Memory Systems

The memory system remains a major performance bottleneck in modern and future architectures. In this dissertation, we propose a hardware/software cooperative approach and demonstrate its effectiveness. This approach combines the global yet imperfect view of the compiler with the timely yet narrow-scope context of the hardware. It relies on a light-weight extension to the instruction set architecture to convey compile-time knowledge (hints) to the hardware. The hardware then uses these hints to make better decisions. Our work shows that a..