Prolonging the Lifetime of Non-Volatile Last Level Cache Using Spare Blocks

Jokar, Mohammad Reza; Arjomand, Mohammad; Sarbazi-Azad, Hamid

Prolonging the Lifetime of Non-Volatile Last Level Cache Using Spare Blocks

نویسندگان

Mohammad Reza Jokar ¹^{، 2}

Mohammad Arjomand ³^{، 2}

Hamid Sarbazi-Azad ²^{، 4}

¹ Computer Science Department, the University of Chicago, IL, USA

² Computer Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

³ Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Pennsylvania State University, PA 16801, USA

⁴ School of Computer Science, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran

چکیده

Non-volatile memory technologies, such as STT-RAM, have high cell density and near-zero leakage power. Thus,non-volatile STT-RAM caches can be considered as a proper candidate to replace traditional SRAM-based caches.Beside the mentioned advantages, non-volatile technologies suffer from low write-endurance and this can lead to short lifetime of non-volatile caches. In this paper, we propose a new method to increase the lifetime of nonvolatile last level caches by adding spare blocks in each set. When a block is failed in a set, we simply remove that block from the set and pad a spare block to the set. Evaluation results show that the proposed method can improve over the state-of-the art by 20% and 8% in lifetime and performance.

کلیدواژه‌ها

Non-Volatile Memory

Last Level Cache

STT-RAM

Write Endurance

Lifetime