UNIVERSAL CACHE MISS EQUATIONS FOR AUTONOMIC COMPUTING.pdf

June 4, 2006 13:9 WSPC - Proceedings Trim Size: 9in x 6in Tay 1 A RESEARCH PROGRAM PROPOSAL: UNIVERSAL CACHE MISS EQUATIONS FOR AUTONOMIC COMPUTING ? Y.C. TAY? Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge 117543, Republic of Singapore ?E-mail: dcstayyc@.sg .sg/～tayyc Computer systems in large enterprises and in the outsourcing industry are difficult to manage manually. This difficulty has led to a push for autonomic computing, where the goal is to have the system automatically configure its settings, tune its performance and recover from failures. Such large systems have innumerable caches to enhance performance. One task in autonomic computing lies in sizing these caches and sharing them out among competing workloads. Cache miss equations can help to automate this task. For the cache miss equations to be helpful, they must be universal: they must fit any real memory reference pattern and cache management policy, through parameters that can be calibrated automatically and dynamically. This paper proposes a research program to derive such equations. This proposal is for a drastic departure from forty years of cache miss analysis. Three cache miss equations – one each for main memory, database buffers and processor caches – are presented as evidence for the feasibility of the re- search program. Keywords: autonomic computing; cache miss; memory hierarchy 1. Introduction Autonomic computing 1,2 is driven by the increasing difficulty in manually configuring, tuning and maintaining enterprise-scale computer systems. As memory is a primary resource, some of this difficulty lies in sizing the many types of caches that are everywhere in every system. The difficulty in system management has led to outsourcing and the ?This work was supported by National University of Singapore under ARF grant R-146- 000-072-112. June 4, 2006 13:9 WSPC - Proceedings Trim Size: 9in x 6in Tay 2 growth of storage service providers, Internet data c