OS Scheduling Algorithms for Memory Intensive Workloads in Multi-socket Multi-core Servers

Abstract

Major chip manufacturers have all introduced multicore microprocessors. Multi-socket systems built from these processors are used for running various server applications. Depending on the application, remote cache-to-cache transfers can severely impact the performance of such workloads. This paper presents a cache optimization that can cut down remote cache-tocache transfers. By keeping track of remote cache lines loaded from remote caches into last-level-cache and by biasing the cache replacement policy towards such remote cache lines we can reduce the number of cache misses. This in turn results in improvement of overall performance. I present the design details in this paper. I do a qualitative comparison of various solutions to the problem of performance impact of remote cache-to-cache transfers. This work can be extended by doing a quantitative evaluation.