Benzene

Abstract

This article proposes Benzene, an energy-efficient distributed SRAM/STT-RAM hybrid cache for manycore systems running multiple applications. It is based on the observation that a naïve application of hybrid cache techniques to distributed caches in a manycore architecture suffers from limited energy reduction due to uneven utilization of scarce SRAM. We propose two-level optimization techniques: intra-bank and inter-bank. Intra-bank optimization leverages highly associative cache design, achieving more uniform distribution of writes within a bank. Inter-bank optimization evenly balances the amount of write-intensive data across the banks. Our evaluation results show that Benzene significantly reduces energy consumption of distributed hybrid caches.