Using Cache-coloring to Mitigate Inter-set Write Variation in Non-volatile Caches

Abstract: In recent years, researchers have explored use of non-volatile devices such as STT-RAM (spin torque transfer RAM) for designing on-chip caches, since they provide high density and consume low leakage power. A common limitation of all non-volatile devices is their limited write endurance. Further, since existing cache management policies are write-variation unaware, excessive writes to a few blocks may lead to a quick failure of the whole cache. We propose an architectural technique for wear-leveling of non-volatile last level caches (LLCs). Our technique uses cache-coloring approach which adds a software-controlled mapping layer between groups of physical pages and cache sets. Periodically the mapping is altered to ensure that write-traffic can be spread uniformly to different sets of the cache to achieve wear-leveling. Simulations performed with an x86-64 simulator and SPEC2006 benchmarks show that our technique reduces the worst-case writes to cache blocks and thus improves the cache lifetime by 4.07X.