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Title:An OS-Based Alternative to Full Hardware Coherence on Tiled CMPs
Authors: Chris Fensch ; Marcelo Cintra
Date:Feb 2008
Publication Title:Proceedings of the 14 International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Publisher:IEEE
Publication Type:Conference Paper Publication Status:Published
Page Nos:355-366
ISBN/ISSN:978-1-4244-2070-4
Abstract:
The interconnect mechanisms (shared bus or crossbar) used in current chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) are expected to become a bottleneck that prevents these architectures from scaling to a larger number of cores. Tiled CMPs offer better scalability by integrating relatively simple cores with a lightweight point-to-point interconnect. However, such interconnects make snooping impractical and, thus, require alternative solutions to cache coherence. This paper proposes a novel, cost-effective mechanism to support shared-memory parallel applications that forgoes hardware maintained cache coherence. The proposed mechanism is based on the key ideas that mapping of lines to physical caches is done at the page level with OS support and that hardware supports remote cache accesses. It allows only some controlled migration and replication of data and provides a sufficient degree of flexibility in the mapping through an extra level of indirection between virtual pages and physical tiles. We evaluate the proposed tiled CMP architecture on the Splash-2 scientific benchmarks and ALPBench multimedia benchmarks against one with private caches and a distributed directory cache coherence mechanism. Experimental results show that the performance degradation is as little as 0%, and 16% on average, compared to the cache coherent architecture across all benchmarks for 16 and 32 processors.
Copyright:
2008 by IEEE. All Rights Reserved
Links To Paper
No links available
Bibtex format
@InProceedings{EDI-INF-RR-1238,
author = { Chris Fensch and Marcelo Cintra },
title = {An OS-Based Alternative to Full Hardware Coherence on Tiled CMPs},
book title = {Proceedings of the 14 International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture},
publisher = {IEEE},
year = 2008,
month = {Feb},
pages = {355-366},
}


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