Paper Info
Title
vCAT: Dynamic Cache Management Using CAT Virtualization
Abstract
This paper presents vCAT, a novel design for dynamic shared cache management on multicore virtualization platforms based on Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT). Our design achieves strong isolation at both task and VM levels through cache partition virtualization, which works in a similar way as memory virtualization, but has challenges that are unique to cache and CAT. To demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of our design, we provide a prototype implementation of vCAT, and we present an extensive set of microbenchmarks and performance evaluation results on the PARSEC benchmarks and synthetic workloads, for both static and dynamic allocations. The evaluation results show that (i) vCAT can be implemented with minimal overhead, (ii) it can be used to mitigate shared cache interference, which could have caused task WCET increased by up to 7.2×, (iii) static management in vCAT can increase system utilization by up to 7× compared to a system without cache management, and (iv) dynamic management substantially outperforms static management in terms of schedulable utilization (increase by up to 3× in our multi-mode example use case).
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/RTAS.2017.15
2017 IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
vCAT,CAT virtualization,dynamic shared cache management,multicore virtualization platforms,Intel,cache allocation technology,cache partition virtualization,memory virtualization,PARSEC benchmarks
Virtualization,Cache pollution,Shared memory,Computer science,Cache,Cache algorithms,Real-time computing,Memory virtualization,Cache coloring,Smart Cache,Operating system,Embedded system
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5090-5270-7
11
0.52
References 
Authors
22
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Meng Xu121118.89
Linh Thi Xuan Phan2132.24
Xuan Phan3110.52
Hyon-Young Choi4151.64
Insup Lee5226.11