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DICE: Compressing DRAM Caches for Bandwidth and Capacity by Young, Vinson ;Nair, Prashant J. ;Qureshi, Moinuddin K. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is DICE: Compressing DRAM Caches for Bandwidth and Capacity about?

This paper investigates compression for DRAM caches. As the capacity of DRAM cache is typically large, prior techniques on cache compression, which solely focus on improving cache capacity, provide only a marginal benefit. We show that more performance benefit can be obtained if the compression of the DRAM cache is tailored to provide higher bandwidth. If a DRAM cache can provide two compressed lines in a single access, and both lines are useful, the effective bandwidth of the DRAM cache would double. Unfortunately, it is not straight-forward to compress DRAM caches for bandwidth. The typically used Traditional Set Indexing (TSI) maps consecutive lines to consecutive sets, so the multiple compressed lines obtained from the set are from spatially distant locations and unlikely to be used within a short period of each other. We can change the indexing of the cache to place consecutive lines in the same set to improve bandwidth; however, when the data is incompressible, such spatial indexing reduces effective capacity and causes significant slowdown. Ideally, we would like to have spatial indexing when the data is compressible and TSI otherwise. To this end, we propose Dynamic-Indexin

Author

Young, Vinson ;Nair, Prashant J. ;Qureshi, Moinuddin K.

Publisher

ACM

Published

2017

Language

EN