Cache coherence using local knowledge
Ervan Darnell, Ken Kennedy · 1993
Typically, commercially available shared memory machines have addressed the cache coherence problem with hardware strategies based on global inter-cache communication.However, global communication limits scalabihly and eficiency."Local knowledge' 'coherences trategies, which avoid global communication at run-time, ofler better scalability, at the cost of some additional cache misses.The most eflective Iocalknowledge strategies described in the literature are those based on generation timestamps (TS).We propose a new strategy, TS1, that requires less extra storage than TS, only one extra bit per cache line, and can produce more cache hits by exploiting sophisticated compiler analysis.TS1 handles common synchronization paradigms including DCMLL, I) CIACFtCISS, and critical sections.Early results show TS1 is, worst case, slightly slower than TS.Best case, TS1's flexibility allows for significant improvements.