Moin Qureshi

Professor’s Paper Awarded for Enduring Impact

Morgan Usry
College of ComputingSchool of Computer Science
Research

Professor Moin Qureshi was awarded the Test of Time Award at the 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2024) for his groundbreaking MICRO 2006 paper on multi-core caches.

The paper Utility-Based Cache Partitioning: A Low-Overhead, High-Performance, Runtime Mechanism to Partition Shared Caches offered a solution for dividing a cache between more than one processor. Qureshi wrote it while a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and co-authored it with his Ph.D. advisor, Professor Yale Patt.

A cache is used to store data temporarily, allowing that data to be accessed faster and easier. Before 2004, a computer chip typically had only a single processor. When multi-chip processors became available, computer scientists were divided over how to share the cache between them.

Qureshi’s paper found that it was more efficient to divide the cache based on which processor would benefit the most from resource allocation at any given time.

“Processors still have a shared cache, and they still need to figure out how to divide the shared cache. This paper provides a principled approach to managing that,” Qureshi said of the paper’s relevance.

Qureshi said the paper is the first to lay the groundwork for principled resource allocation in computer hardware. This work applies to caches and other resource allocations in computer systems, such as bandwidth partitioning, core partitioning, and memory partitioning.

As a testament to its ongoing relevance and impact, the paper is the most highly cited research paper on on-chip caches, a topic with more than four decades of research. The paper currently has around 1,500 citations.

“The following this paper got was a bit surprising to me but in hindsight, the clarity that the paper provided on resource allocation has been its real contribution and why it won this award,” he said.

In addition to this award, Qureshi gave the opening keynote speech at MICRO. Three of his papers were accepted at the conference, and Poulami Das, Qureshi’s former Ph.D. student, won the outstanding dissertation award.