FSB: A flexible set-balancing strategy for last-level caches

This paper describes Flexible Set Balancing (FSB), a practical strategy for providing high-performance caching. Our work is motivated by a large asymmetry in the usage of cache sets. FSB extends the lifetime of cache lines via retaining some fraction of the working set at underutilized sets to satisfy far-flung reuses. FSB promotes a very flexible sharing among cache sets, referred to as many-from-many sharing, providing significant reduction in interference misses. Simulation results using a full-system simulator that models a 16-way tiled chip multiprocessor platform demonstrate that FSB achieves an average miss rate reduction of 36.6% on multithreading and multiprogramming benchmarks from SPEC2006, PARSEC, and SPLASH-2 suites. This translates into an average execution-time improvement of 13%. Furthermore, evaluations showed the outperformance of FSB over some recent proposals including DSBC [27] and V-WAY [25].