Open Access
ECAP: energy‐efficient caching for prefetch blocks in tiled chip multiprocessors
Author(s) -
Deb Dipika,
Jose John,
Palesi Maurizio
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
iet computers and digital techniques
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.219
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1751-861X
pISSN - 1751-8601
DOI - 10.1049/iet-cdt.2019.0035
Subject(s) - instruction prefetch , computer science , cache , cache pollution , parallel computing , cache algorithms , page cache , smart cache , energy consumption , cache coloring , network packet , router , block (permutation group theory) , embedded system , cpu cache , computer network , ecology , geometry , mathematics , biology
With the increase in processing cores performance have increased, but energy consumption and memory access latency have become a crucial factor in determining system performance. In tiled chip multiprocessor, tiles are interconnected using a network and different application runs in different tiles. Non‐uniform load distribution of applications results in varying L1 cache usage pattern. Application with larger memory footprint uses most of its L1 cache. Prefetching on top of such application may cause cache pollution by evicting useful demand blocks from the cache. This generates further cache misses which increases the network traffic. Therefore, an inefficient prefetch block placement strategy may result in generating more traffic that may increase congestion and power consumption in the network. This also dampens the packet movement rate which increases miss penalty at the cores thereby affecting Average Memory Access Time (AMAT). The authors propose an energy‐efficient caching strategy for prefetch blocks, ECAP. It uses the less used cache set of nearby tiles running light applications as virtual cache memories for the tiles running high applications to place the prefetch blocks. ECAP reduces AMAT, router and link power in NoC by 23.54%, 14.42%, and 27%, respectively as compared to the conventional prefetch placement technique.