SHF: Small: Footprint Models and Techniques for Multi-core Cache Management

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This research aims at developing new theories and techniques tobetter understand and manage shared memory cache in multi-core architectures. The core concept is program footprint, which is the amount of memory access in a period ofexecution. Complete measurement requires counting data access in allexecution windows, which is too costly. Thisresearch develops computational methods to first make all-windowanalysis feasible through a set of new profiling algorithms and thenmake this analysis cost-effective by reducing the cost through statisticalinference, sampling, and parallel profiling and effectively obtainingthis information in real time as a program executes. Footprintinformation is essential in analyzing cache sharing between programsand program tasks. It enables the second part of the project, a setof tools that predict the performance of parallel workloads withoutparallel testing. In addition, the footprint information enables afundamentally different approach to common techniques. In the thirdpart, the project develops a new cache-hint insertion tool toapproximate optimal caching and amemory-performance tuning tool to be used by software developer.As multi-core processors become commonplace and cloud computing isgaining acceptance, more applications are run in a shared environment.The outcome of this research will fundamentally alter the wayprogrammers understand and improve memory performance on multi-coresystems. Software developers and hardware engineers will have a newtool set to tackle the complex problem of managing on-chip memory fornot just sequential but also parallel code and for not just achievinggood performance but also for ensuring stable performance in a dynamicenvironment. The broader impacts of this research will includedeeper understanding and more precise characterization of localityin computational processes, which has implications in othercomputing-related disciplines, and memory efficient software andhardware design, which saves energy and cost and has broad economicaland social benefits.