Some Considerations About Passive Sharing in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
Cosimo Antonio Prete, G. Prina, Roberto Giorgi, Luigi M. Ricciardi · 1997
In a multiprocessor system, process migration guarantees load balance between processors but causes passive sharing, since private data blocks of a process can become resident in multiple caches and generate useless coherence-related overhead. We propose a selective invalidation strategy to eliminate these passive shared copies. The results of trace-driven simulation prove that our strategy can result successful in a number of situations such as the typical case of a general-purpose workstation. 1. Introduction A major issue in the design of multiprocessor architectures is the cache coherence problem: when two or more processors store a copy of the same memory block in their private caches and one of them performs a write operation on a location within that block, a coherenceprotocol is required in order to guarantee that each subsequent read operation byany processor may get the up-to-date value of the modi#ed location. For any kind of hardware organization, when the number of nod...