Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering and Applied Sciences: Research Areas

Abstract:
Today supercomputers play a big role in our life for complex applications. Multicore processors represent the most significant part in supercomputers. A multicore processor consists of several cores which can execute different tasks independently. Due to the budget and chip area limit, the last level cache is usually shared among cores. Running tasks on different cores access the shared cache intensively and concurrently. This may lead to cache miss rate and significant performance degradation. In this paper, we study the effect of cache architectures on the performance of multicore processors for multi-threading applications and their limitations on increasing the number of processor cores. The study focus on two design issues: cache architecture and configuration parameters. It also based on a cache simulator that models the functionality of a multicore cache hierarchy with arbitrary levels and various organizations. Our evaluations also help in determining the best cache architecture and configuration for a given number of cores to obtain the good performance.

Keywords: cache memory, multicore processing, performance analysis, simulation architecture

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