Protection and utilization in shared cache through rationing

Shared cache is generally optimized for overall throughput, fairness, or both. Increasingly in shared environments, e.g., compute clouds, users are unrelated to one another. In such circumstances, an overall gain in throughput does not justify an individual loss. This paper explores a new strategy for conservative sharing, which protects the cache occupancy for individual programs, but still enables full cache sharing whenever there is unused space.