Cloak

Abstract

The increased memory demands of workloads are putting high pressure on Last Level Caches (LLCs). In general, there is limited opportunity to increase the capacity of LLCs due to the area and power requirements of the underlying SRAM technology. Interestingly, emerging Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies promise a feasible alternative to SRAM for LLCs due to their higher area density. However, NVMs have substantially higher read and write latencies, which offset their density benefit. Although researchers have proposed methods to tolerate NVM's higher write latency, little emphasis has been placed on the critical NVM read latency.To address this problem, this paper proposes Cloak. Cloak exploits page-level data reuse in the LLC, to hide NVM read latency. Specifically, on certain L1 DTLB misses, Cloak transfers LLC-resident data belonging to the TLB-missing page from the LLC NVM array to a set of small SRAM Page Buffers that will service subsequent requests to this page. Further, to enable the high-bandwidth, lowlatency transfer of lines of a page to the page buffers, Cloak uses an LLC layout that accelerates the discovery of LLC-resident cache lines from the page. We evaluate Cloak with full-system simulations of a 4-core processor across 14 workloads. We find that, on average, a machine with Cloak is faster than one with an SRAM LLC by 23.8% and one with an NVM-only LLC by 8.9%-in both cases, with negligible change in area. Further, Cloak reduces the ED 2 metric relative to these designs by 39.9% and 17.5%, respectively. CCS CONCEPTS• Hardware → Non-volatile memory.