Near-Optimal Padding for Removing Conflict Misses

The effectiveness of the memory hierarchy is critical for the performance of current processors. The performance of the memory hierarchy can be improved by means of program transformations such as padding, which is a code transformation targeted to reduce conflict misses. This paper presents a novel approach to perform near-optimal padding for multi-level caches. It analyzes programs, detecting conflict misses by means of the Cache Miss Equations. A genetic algorithm is used to compute the parameter values that enhance the program. Our results show that it can remove practically all conflicts among variables in the SPECfp95, targeting all the different cache levels simultaneously.