RT Journal Article
T1 Write-aware replacement policies for PCM-based systems
A1 Rodríguez, Rodríguez
A1 Castro Rodríguez, Fernando
A1 Chaver, D.
A1 González Alberquilla, R.
A1 Piñuel Moreno, Luis
A1 Tirado Fernández, José Francisco
AB The gap between processor and memory speeds is one of the greatest challenges that current designers face in order to develop more powerful computer systems. In addition, the scalability of the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) technology is very limited nowadays, leading one to consider new memory technologies as candidates for the replacement of conventional DRAM. Phase-Change Memory (PCM) is currently postulated as the prime contender due to its higher scalability and lower leakage. However, compared with DRAM, PCM also exhibits some drawbacks, like lower endurance or higher dynamic energy consumption and write latency, that need to be mitigated before it can be used as the main memory technology for the next generation of computers. This work addresses the PCM endurance constraint. For this purpose, we present an analysis of conventional cache replacement policies in terms of the amount of writebacks to main memory that they imply and we also propose some new replacement algorithms for the last-level cache (LLC) with the goal of cutting down the write traffic to memory and consequently, to increase PCM lifetime without degrading system performance. In this paper, we target general purpose processors provided with this kind of non-volatile main memory and we exhaustively evaluate our proposed policies in both single- and multi-core environments. Experimental results show that, on average, compared with a conventional Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm, some of our proposals manage to reduce the amount of writes to main memory up to 20-30% depending on the scenario evaluated, which leads to memory endurance extensions of up to 20-45%, also reducing the energy consumption in the memory hierarchy by up to 9% and hardly degrading performance.
PB Oxford Univ Press
SN 0010-4620
YR 2015
FD 2015-09
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/24237
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/24237
LA eng
NO This work has been supported in part by the Spanish government through the research contract CICYT-TIN 2008/508, TIN2012-32180 and the HIPEAC-3 European Network of Excellence. Also it was supported by a grant scholarship from the University of Costa Rica and Costa Rican Ministry of Science and Technology MICIT and CONICIT.
NO CICYT, Spain
NO HIPEAC-3 European Network of Excellence
NO University of Costa Rica
NO Costa Rican Ministry of Science and Technology MICIT
NO CONICIT, Costa Rica
DS Docta Complutense
RD 7 abr 2025