• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.226-239
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• 2013

A number of systems have several on-chip memories with cache memory being one of them. Conventional cache memory consists of SRAM but the ratio of static energy to the total energy of the memory architecture becomes larger as the leakage power of traditional SRAM increases. Spin-Torque Transfer RAM (STT-RAM), which is a variety of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM), has many advantages over SRAM, such as high density, low leakage power, and non-volatility, but it consumes too much writing energy. This study evaluated a wide range of energy consumptions of a two-level cache using NVM partially on a mobile processor. Through a number of experimental evaluations, it was confirmed that the use of NVM partially in the two-level cache effectively reduces energy consumption significantly.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.245-252
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• 2018

Non-volatile RAM devices have been increasingly viewed as an alternative of DRAM main memory system. However some technologies including phase-change memory (PCM) are still suffering from relatively poor write performance as well as limited endurance. In this paper, we introduce a proactive last-level cache management to efficiently hide a low write performance of non-volatile main memory systems. The proposed method significantly reduces the cache miss penalty by proactively evicting the part of cachelines when the non-volatile main memory system is in idle state. Our trace-driven simulation demonstrates 24% performance enhancement, compared with a conventional LRU cache management, on the average.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.108-116
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• 2013

Many algorithms have been introduced to improve performance by using massively parallel systems, which consist of several hundreds of processors. A typical example is a GPU system of many processors which uses shared memory. In the case of image filtering algorithms, which make references to neighboring points, the shared memory helps improve performance by frequently accessing adjacent pixels. However, using shared memory requires rewriting the existing codes and consequently results in complexity of the codes. Recent GPU systems support both L1 and L2 cache along with shared memory. Since the L1 cache memory is located in the same area as the shared memory, the improvement of performance is predictable by using the cache memory. In this paper, the performance of cache and shared memory were compared. In conclusion, the performance of cache-based algorithm is very similar to the one of shared memory. The complexity of the code appearing in a shared memory system, however, is resolved with the cache-based algorithm.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.428-436
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• 2017

State-of-the-art processors require increasingly complicated memory services for high performance and low power consumption. In particular, they request transfers within a burst in a wrap-around order to minimize the miss penalty of a cache. However, synchronous dynamic random access memories (SDRAMs) do not always generate transfers in the wrap-round order required by the processors. Thus, a memory subsystem rearranges the SDRAM transfers in the wrap-around order, but the rearrangement process may increase memory latency and waste the bandwidth of on-chip interconnects. In this paper, we present a memory subsystem that is effective for the wrapping bursts of a cache. The proposed memory subsystem makes SDRAMs generate transfers in an intermediate order, where the transfers are rearranged in the wrap-around order with minimal penalties. Then, the transfers are delivered with priority, depending on the program locality in space. Experimental results showed that the proposed memory subsystem minimizes the memory performance loss resulting from wrapping bursts and, thus, improves program execution time.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.11_12
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• pp.541-556
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• 2005

The memory access latency of the system has been a primary factor of performance degradation in single-processor system and multi-processor system. The remote memory access latency takes a lot of overhead over the local memory access latency especially in the distributed shared-memory system. To resolve this problem, the multi-level cache architecture that contains a remote cache in the multi-processor system has been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new cache replacement policy that improves the performance of the multi-processor system with the remote cache. If the multi-level cache keeps the multi-level inclusion(MLI) property and uses the LRU(Least Recently Used) cache replacement policy, the LRU information of the higher-level cache(a processor cache) would be different with that of the lower-level cache(a remote cache). In this situation, the replacement of a remote cache line can induce the exchange of a processor cache line that is used by the processor. It is a main factor of performance degradation in a whole system. To alleviate this disadvantage of the LRU replacement polity, the new policy analyses tht processor's remote memory access pattern of each node and uses this information to reduce the number of invalidations of the useful cache line in the higher-level cache. The new replacement policy of the remote cache can improve the performance by $3.5\%$ in maximum and $2.5\%$ in average on SPLASH-2 benchmarks, compared to the general LRU cache replacement policy.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.31 no.12
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• pp.716-725
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• 2004

It is extremely important to minimize network access time in constructing a high-performance PC cluster system. For PC cluster systems, it is possible to reduce network access time by maintaining network cache in each cluster node. This paper presents a Network Cache Coherent NUMA (NCC-NUMA) system to utilize network cache by locating shared memory on the PCI bus, and the NCC-NUMA card which is core module of the NCC-NUMA system is developed. The NCC-NUMA card is directly plugged into the PCI slot of each node, and contains shared memory, network cache, shared memory control module and network control module. The network cache is maintained for the shared memory on the PCI bus of cluster nodes. The coherency mechanism between the network cache and the shared memory is based on the IEEE SCI standard. According to the SPLASH-2 benchmark experiments, the NCC-NUMA system showed improvements of 56% compared with an SCI-based cluster without network cache.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.53-58
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• 2009

This paper presents a novel approach in the design of a CAM for an asynchronous cache. The architecture of cache mainly consists of four units: control logics, content addressable memory, completion signal logic units and instruction memory. The pseudo-DCVSL is useful to make a completion signal which is a reference for handshake control. The proposed CAM is a very simple extension of the basic circuitry that makes a completion signal based on DI model. The cache has 2.75KB CAM for 8KB instruction memory. We designed and simulated the proposed asynchronous cache including CAM. The results show that the cache hit ratio is up to 95% based on pseudo-LRU replacement policy.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.11
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• pp.101-109
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• 2009

Generally, depth cache and pixel cache of 3D graphics are designed by using write-back scheme for efficient use of memory bandwidth. Also, there are write after read operations of same address or only write operations are occurred frequently in 3D graphics cache. If a cache miss is detected, an access to the external memory for write back operation and another access to the memory for handling the cache miss are operated simultaneously. So on frequent cache miss situations, as the memory access bandwidth limited, the access time of the external memory will be increased due to memory bottleneck problem. As a result, the total performance of the processor or the IP will be decreased, also the problem will increase peak power consumption. So in this paper, we proposed a novel early write back cache architecture so as to solve the problems issued above. The proposed architecture controls the point when to access the external memory as to copy the valid data block. And this architecture can improve the cache performance with same hit ratio and same capacity cache. As a result, the proposed architecture can solve the memory bottleneck problem by preventing intensive memory accesses. We have evaluated the new proposed architecture on 3D graphics z cache and pixel cache on a SoC environment where ARM11, 3D graphic accelerator and various IPs are embedded. The simulation results indicated that there were maximum 75% of performance increase when using various simulation vectors.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.87-95
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• 2016

Nonvolatile memory (NVM) is being considered as an alternative of traditional memory devices such as SRAM and DRAM, which suffer from various limitations due to the technology scaling of modern integrated circuits. Although NVMs have advantages including nonvolatility, low leakage current, and high density, their inferior write performance in terms of energy and endurance becomes a major challenge to the successful design of NVM-based memory systems. In order to overcome the aforementioned drawback of the NVM, extensive research is required to develop energy- and endurance-aware optimization techniques for NVM-based memory systems. However, researchers have experienced difficulty in finding a suitable simulation tool to prototype and evaluate new NVM optimization schemes because existing simulation tools do not consider the feature of NVM devices. In this article, we introduce a NVM-based cache simulator to support rapid prototyping and evaluation of NVM-based caches, as well as energy- and endurance-aware NVM cache optimization schemes. We demonstrate that the proposed NVM cache simulator can easily prototype PRAM cache and PRAM+STT-RAM hybrid cache as well as evaluate various write traffic reduction schemes and wear leveling schemes.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.205-210
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• 2014

Cache based live migration method utilizes a cache, which is accessible to both side (remote and local), to reduce the virtual machine migration time, by transferring only irredundant data. However, address space layout randomization (ASLR) is proved to reduce the memory duplicate ratio between targeted migration memory and the migration cache. In this pager, we analyzed the behavior of ASLR to find out how it changes the physical memory contents of virtual machines. We found that among six virtual memory regions, only the modification to stack influences the page-level memory duplicate ratio. Experiments showed that: (1) the ASLR does not shift the heap region in sub-page level; (2) the stack reduces the duplicate page size among VMs which performed input replay around 40MB, when ASLR was enabled; (3) the size of memory pages, which can be reconstructed from the fresh booted up state, also reduces by about 60MB by ASLR. With those observations, when applying cache-based migration method, we can omit the stack region. While for other five regions, even a coarse page-level redundancy data detecting method can figure out most of the duplicate memory contents.