Cooperative shared memory: software and hardware for scalable multiprocessors
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Mechanisms for cooperative shared memory
ISCA '93 Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on computer architecture
Developing parallel applications using high-performance simulation
PADD '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/ONR workshop on Parallel and distributed debugging
An evaluation of directory protocols for medium-scale shared-memory multiprocessors
ICS '94 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Supercomputing
Thread prioritization: a thread scheduling mechanism for multiple-context parallel processors
HPCA '95 Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Elimination Trees and the Construction of Pools and Stacks
Theory of Computing Systems
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Caches have the potential to provide multiprocessors with an automatic mechanism for reducing both network traffic and average memory access latency. However, cache-based systems must address the problem of cache coherence. This thesis presents the results of the search for a cache coherence solution for Alewife, a large-scale multiprocessor being built at MIT. The research focuses on coherence protocols that use a directory, a list of cached copies of data, to avoid the need for a system-wide broadcast mechanism. The structure and the implementation of a number of coherence schemes are evaluated with coupled and decoupled simulation techniques. In addition to comparing the protocols in terms of hardware overhead and performance, the thesis reports on the experience gained by implementing several different schemes in ASIM, the Alewife machine simulator. The protocol search reaches two major conclusions: First, by using system-level optimizations, it is possible to use caches to build large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors. Second, the Alewife machine should use the integrated systems approach - handling common cases in hardware and exceptional cases in software - to solve the cache coherence problem.