Bank Coherence Techniques for Solving the Data Competition Problem in CMP NUCA
Pan Xiaohui · Computer Engineering and Science · 2009
Non-Uniform Cache Architecture (NUCA) has almost been the trend of large cache designs. In CMP-DNUCA,two or more processors may access the same data,leading to the data competition problem. The data competition problem often makes the shared data stay in the central bank,so it brings a large cache access time. This paper proposes a bank coherence technique for supporting multi-copies of the shared data,which reduces the data competition effectively through making different data copies for processors. This paper studies the bank coherence protocol in detail. Finally,we test 8 NPB benchmarks using a full-system simulator. The experimental results show that the approach proposed in this paper effectively alleviates the data competition problem. Compared with CMP-DNUCA,the bank coherence mechanism achieves an average system IPC improvement of 5.95%.