Communist, utilitarian, and capitalist cache policies on CMPs: caches as a shared resource

As chip multiprocessors (CMPs) become increasingly mainstream, architects have likewise become more interested in how best to share a cache hierarchy among multiple simultaneous threads of execution. The complexity of this problem is exacerbated as the number of simultaneous threads grows from two or four to the tens or hundreds. However, there is no consensus in the architectural community on what "best" means in this context. Some papers in the literature seek to equalize each thread's performance loss due to sharing, while others emphasize maximizing overall system performance. Furthermore, the specific effect of these goals varies depending on the metric used to define "performance".In this paper we label equal performance targets as Communist cache policies and overall performance targets as Utilitarian cache policies. We compare both of these models to the most common current model of a free-for-all cache (a Capitalist policy). We consider various performance metrics, including miss rates, bandwidth usage, and IPC, including both absolute and relative values of each metric. Using analytical models and behavioral cache simulation, we find that the optimal partitioning of a shared cache can vary greatly as different but reasonable definitions of optimality are applied. We also find that, although Communist and Utilitarian targets are generally compatible, each policy has workloads for which it provides poor overall performance or poor fairness, respectively. Finally, we find that simple policies like LRU replacement and static uniform partitioning are not sufficient to provide near-optimal performance under any reasonable definition, indicating that some thread-aware cache resource allocation mechanism is required.