Size Reduction and Performance Analysis of the Bit-map Table Used in the Bus-based Shared Memory System
Jongjung Woo, Ka-Young Lee · The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society · 1998
The bus contention among bus-based shared-memory multiprocessors limits their performance. In addition, under split bus transaction environment, multiprocessors may make some memory requests unnecessary stand by in the memory access buffer, which makes system performance worse. This unnecessary stand-by can be eliminated by maintaining the bitmap table which contains the status bit for each memory block. However, this mechanism requires a great size of SRAM for the status information, which is fully mapped from the whole memory blocks. To solve this problem, we propose a bitmap cache which exploits partial mapping and locality of references. The simulation results show that the proposed system can greatly reduce the capacity of SRAM for the status information with little deteriorating its performance.