MANAGER: A Multicore Shared Cache Energy Saving Technique for QoS Systems

Last level caches (LLCs) contribute significantly to processor power consumption. Saving LLC energy in multicore QoS systems is especially challenging, since aggressive energy saving techniques may lead to failure in providing QoS. We present MANAGER, a multicore shared cache energy saving technique for quality-of-service systems. Using dynamic profiling, MANAGER periodically predicts cache access activity for different configurations. Then, cache is partitioned among running programs to fulfill the QoS requirement while saving memory subsystem (LLC+DRAM) energy. Out-of-order simulations performed using dual-core workloads from SPEC2006 suite show that for 4MB LLC, MANAGER saves 13.5% memory subsystem energy, over a statically, equally-partitioned baseline cache.