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Computer Science @ Rochester
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
12:00 PM
Computer Studies Bldg. Room 703
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
Xiaoya Xiang
University of Rochester
Program Footprint Management for Shared Cache
With the rapid adoption of multi-core, multi-processor systems, applications are increasingly run in parallel using a shared memory hierarchy. In traditional profiling, memory performance of a single application is mostly measured by reuse distance, which is defined for pairs of memory accesses to the same data. In a shared environment, a reuse distance in one application is affected by the footprint of other concurrent programs. Informally, the footprint is the number of distinct data accessed in an execution window. Complete measurement of footprints requires measuring all possible execution windows, the number of which is quadratic to the length of the execution.

In my thesis research, I will first develop efficient techniques for measuring all-window footprint and then study the difference between reuse distance and footprint especially their effect on shared cache performance. Through the study, I will build footprint-based models of cache sharing. Some footprint oriented improvement techniques using the models will also be proposed. These techniques will be explored to reduce application footprint and improve its shared-cache performance on today's multicore systems.