Section: Software

Cache Control

Participants : Guillaume Huard [correspondant] , Swann Perarnau.

• Characterization of Software : A-1 / SO-3 / SM-3 / EM-2 / SDL-3

• Own Contribution: DA-4 / CD-4 / MS-4 / TPM-4

• Additional information:

  • web site: http://ccontrol.ligforge.imag.fr/

  • Objective of the software: Cache Control is a Linux kernel module enabling user applications to restrict their memory allocations to a subset of the hardware memory cache. This module reserves and exports available physical memory as virtual devices that can be mmap'd to. It gives to calling processes physical memory using only a subset of the cache (similarly to page coloring). It actually creates cache partitions that can be used simultaneously by a process to control how much cache a data structure can use.

  • Users community: Research open source project, small community: developers wanting to measure or tune the cache usage of their applications. Does not apply to recent NUCA caches.

  • Positioning: Competing tool is ULCC which does the same thing at the runtime level, more details in : Swann Perarnau, Marc Tchiboukdjian, and Guillaume Huard. Controlling cache utilization of hpc applications. In International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), 2011.