MICRO '53: Proceedings of the 53nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Virtual Athens, Greece, October 17-21, 2020.
Brian Schwedock, Nathan Beckmann
Carnegie Mellon University
The datacenter introduces new challenges for computer systems around tail latency and security. This paper argues that dynamic NUCA techniques are a better solution to these challenges than prior cache designs. We show that dynamic NUCA designs can meet tail-latency deadlines with much less cache space than prior work, and that they also provide a natural defense against cache attacks. Unfortunately, prior dynamic NUCAs have missed these opportunities because they focus exclusively on reducing data movement.
We present Jumanji, a dynamic NUCA technique designed for tail latency and security. We show that prior last-level cache designs are vulnerable to new attacks and offer imperfect performance isolation. Jumanji solves these problems while significantly improving performance of co-running batch applications. Moreover, Jumanji only requires lightweight hardware and a few simple changes to system software, similar to prior D-NUCAs. At 20 cores, Jumanji improves batch weighted speedup by 14% on average, vs. just 2% for a non-NUCA design with weaker security, and is within 2% of an idealized design.
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