Studying Directory Access Patterns via Reuse Distance Analysis and Evaluating Their Impact on Multi-Level Directory Caches

Abstract

The trend for multicore CPUs is towards increasing core count. One of the key limiters to scaling will be the on-chip directory cache. Our work investigates moving portions of the directory away from the cores, perhaps to off-chip DRAM, where ample capacity exists. While such multi-level directory caches exhibit increased latency, several aspects of directory accesses will shield CPU performance from the slower directory, including low access frequency and latency hiding underneath data accesses to main memory. While multi-level directory caches have been studied previously, no work has of yet comprehensively quantified the directory access patterns themselves, making it difficult to understand multi-level behavior in depth. This paper presents a framework based on multicore reuse distance for studying directory cache access patterns. Using our analysis framework, we show between 69-93% of directory entries are looked up only once or twice during their liftimes in the directory cache, and between 51-71% of dynamic directory accesses are latency tolerant. Using cache simulations, we show a very small L1 directory cache can service 80% of latency critical directory lookups. Although a significant number of directory lookups and eviction notifications must access the slower L2 directory cache, virtually all of these are latency tolerant.