Multi-Execution: Multicore Caching for Data-Similar Executions

While microprocessor designers turn to multicore architectures to sustain performance expectations, the dramatic increase in parallelism of such architectures will put substantial demands on off-chip bandwidth and make the memory wall more significant than ever. This paper demonstrates that one profitable application of multicore processors is the execution of many similar instantiations of the same program. The authors identify that this model of execution is used in several practical scenarios and term it as "Multi-execution." Often, each such instance utilizes very similar data. In conventional cache hierarchies, each instance would cache its own data independently. They propose the Mergeable cache architecture that detects data similarities and merges cache blocks, resulting in substantial savings in cache storage requirements.