Effective mechanisms to reduce the overhead of migratory sharing for linked-based cache coherence protocols in clustering multiprocessor architecture

Abstract

Migratory-sharing data references will incur many cache misses that can be reduced by merging the invalidation/update requests and the cache misses. This paper presents effective software and hardware techniques to reduce the overhead of migratory-sharing references for the linked-based cache coherence protocols. The software scheme combines both compiler labeling and run time detection techniques. The hardware scheme uses the special access patterns in the linked-based protocoIs to detect migratory data objects. We have evaluated the performance on the linked-based program-driven simulation environment by using a set of SPLASH benchmarks. According to the simulation results, our software and hardware methods effectively enhanced the system performance up to 29% and 23% respectively by reducing the overhead of the migratory-sharing references.