DynaCache: A Checkpoint Aware Reconfigurable Cache for Intermittently Powered Computing Systems

Energy harvesting devices are rapidly evolving to rival battery-backed technologies. Batteries have a shorter life- time and need maintenance compared to capacitors. Moreover, the usage of batteries comes with undeniable environmental costs. Distinct challenges have emerged such as performance enhancement, crash consistency of data, energy management, etc. To tackle these challenges we propose DynaCache: A checkpoint-aware reconfigurable cache for Intermittent powered computing systems. It is an intermittent computing architecture consisting of a reconfigurable L1 cache that dynamically trans- forms its write policy to strike a favorable trade-off between per- formance, data consistency, and forward progress of a program. Our proposal achieves a speedup in performance of 1.85x and 1.5x compared to non-volatile write-back cache and volatile write- through cache respectively. It also achieves a 99% reduction in dirty data compared to a volatile write-back cache guaranteeing a near absolute data consistency in a scenario of a power failure.