A Software Technique for Reducing Cache Pollution
Andreas Sandberg, David Eklöv, Erik Hägersten · 2010
Contention for shared cache resources has been recognizedas a major bottleneck for multicores—especially for mixedworkloads of independent applications. While most modernprocessors implement instructions to manage caches, theseinstructions are largely unused due to a lack of understand-ing of how to best leverage them. We propose an automatic, low-overhead, method to reducecache contention by finding instructions that are prone tocache trashing and a method to automatically disable cachingfor such instructions. Practical experiments demonstratethat our software-only method can improve application per-formance up to 35% on x86 multicore hardware.