An efficient tree cache coherence protocol for distributed shared memory multiprocessors

Chang, YK

doi:10.1109/12.755001

An efficient tree cache coherence protocol for distributed shared memory multiprocessors

1999-03-01

7

PRE

AI

DOI：10.1109/12.755001

Original

Original request for help

Save

Abstract

En 中文

Directory schemes have long been used to solve the cache coherence problem for large scale shared memory multiprocessors. In addition, tree-based protocols have been employed to reduce the directory size and the invalidation latency for a large degree of data sharing in the system. However, the existing tree-based protocols involve a very high communication overhead for maintaining a balanced tree, especially when the degree of data sharing is low. This paper presents a new tree-based cache coherence protocol which is a hybrid of the limited directory and the linked list schemes. By utilizing a limited number of pointers in the directory, the proposed protocol connects the nodes caching a shared block in a tree fashion without incurring any communication overhead. In addition to the low communication overhead. the proposed scheme also possesses the advantages of the existing bit-map and tree-based linked list protocols, namely, scalable memory requirement and logarithmic invalidation latency. We evaluate the performance of our protocol by running four applications on the Proteus execution-driven simulator. Our simulation results show that the performance of the proposed protocol is very close to that of the full-map protocol.

Keywords:

cache coherence

tree-based directory protocols

shared memory

large scale multiprocessors

execution-driven simulation

An efficient tree cache coherence protocol for distributed shared memory multiprocessors

Abstract

Journal

Organization