An empirical comparison of the Kendall Square Research KSR-1 and Stanford DASH multiprocessors
J. P. Singh, Truman Joe, John LeRoy Hennessy, Aman Gupta · 1993
Two interesting variants of large-scale shared-addressspace parallel architectures are cache-coherent non-uru~ormmemory-access machines (CC-NUMA) and cache-only memory architectures (COMA).Both have distributed main memory and use directory-based cache coherence.While both architectures m-grate and replicate data at the cache level automatically under hardware control, COIUA machines do this at the main memory level as well.Previous work had discussed the general advantages and disadvantages of the two opes of architectures, and presented results comparing the performance of small problems on simulated architectures of the two types.In this piper, we compare the parallel performance of a recent realizatwn of each type of architecturuhe Stanford DASH multiprocessor (CC-NUMA) and the Kendall Square Research KSR-1 (COMA).Using a suite of important computatwrtai kernels and complete scientific applicatwns, we examt"ne performance dl~erences resulting both from the CC-NUMAICOMA nature of the machines as well as from spectfii dt~erences in system implementation.