A Comparative Evaluation of Hardware-Only and Software-Only Directory Protocols in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
Journal article, 2004

The hardware complexity of hardware-only directory protocols in shared-memory multiprocessors has motivated many researchers to emulate directory management by software handlers executed on the compute processors, called software-only directory protocols. In this paper, we evaluate the performance and design trade-offs between these two approaches in the same architectural simulation framework driven by eight applications from the SPLASH-2 suite. Our evaluation reveals some common case operations that can be supported by simple hardware mechanisms and can make the performance of software-only directory protocols competitive with that of hardware-only protocols. These mechanisms aim at either reducing the software handler latency or hiding it by overlapping it with the message latencies associated with inter-node memory transactions. Further, we evaluate the effects of cache block sizes between 16 and 256 bytes as well as two different page placement policies. Overall, we find that a software-only directory protocol enhanced with these mechanisms can reach between 63% and 97% of the baseline hardware-only protocol performance at a lower design complexity.

Shared-memory multiprocessors

Cache coherence

Hardware-only directory protocols

Software-only directory protocols

Performance evaluation

Author

Grahn Håkan

Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, BTH

Per Stenström

Chalmers, Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Architecture

Journal of Systems Architecture

1383-7621 (ISSN)

Vol. 50 9 537-561

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.sysarc.2003.08.014

More information

Latest update

4/6/2018 1