DISTRIBUTED TEMPORAL CACHE FOR SYSTEMS ON A CHIP

A system and method for accessing cache lines of an N-way set associative cache distributed across local memory of compute elements. The set associative cache includes a plurality of sets, with each location in cacheable local memory mapped to one of the sets and each set including N locations for caching data blocks read from the cacheable memory. Each set is mapped to one of the local memories, when that local memory is not in use by local compute elements. A cache controller is configured to receive a read request, to identify a data block in the cacheable memory associated with the address, to determine if the identified data block is in cache in one of the local memories, and, if the identified data block is in cache in one of the local memories, to fetch the identified data block from the cache.