The Spiral Cache: A Self-Organizing Memory Architecture

Volker Strumpen
IBM Austin Research Lab

We propose a self-organizing cache architecture, the spiral cache, to offer scalable performance for large cache capacities and high clock frequencies into physical limits with theoretical guarantees.

Recent work on non-uniform cache architectures (NUCA) recognizes the fact that uniform access latency has become a useless assumption even for on-chip memories. Since the access latency of a memory array is proportional to its side length, it helps to split a large memory into a set of smaller memory tiles. Tiles farther away from the processor incur larger access latencies than those closer to the processor. In such a design, the tile placement policy is a fundamental aspect. By using the well-known move-to-front heuristic as placement policy, we designed a theoretically sound memory architecture, which guarantees competitively low access latencies compared to any conceivable architecture. The spiral cache is a systolic design, capable of maintaining multiple accesses in flight, providing high throughput. Furthermore, the spiral cache exploits the dimensionality of Euclidean space, enabling lower access latencies in future 3D technology.

Joint work with Matteo Frigo, Fadi Gebara, Jeremy Schaub, et al.

Slides:

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About the speaker:

Volker Strumpen is a Research Staff Member at IBM's Austin Research Laboratory. He received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from RWTH Aachen and a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 1995. He served in various academic positions at MIT, Yale University, and the University of Iowa, where he participated in several research projects including Porch - the portable checkpoint compiler, Cilk - an algorithmic multithreaded programming language, and Raw - a single-chip 16-processor architecture. Earlier, he designed several award-winning systems for large-scale parallel distributed computing in workstation networks and the Internet. Volker helped starting up Akamai Technologies and built the prototype of the routing technology that led to Akamai spin-off Sockeye Networks, which has been acquired by Internap. He also spent some time working on semiconductor technology at Sony.

Contact information:

Volker Strumpen
IBM Austin Research Center
http://www.strumpen.net