Intelligent memory manager: Reducing cache pollution due to memory management functions

Abstract

In this work, we show that data-intensive and frequently-used service functions such as memory allocation and de-allocation entangle with application's working set and become a major cause for cache misses. We present our technique that transfers the allocation and de-allocation functions' executions from main CPU to a separate processor residing on chip with DRAM (Intelligent Memory Manager). The results manifested in the paper state that, 60% of the cache misses caused by the service functions are eliminated when using our technique. We believe that cache performance of applications in computer system is poor due to their indulgence for the service functions. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.