Abstract
Despite having been quite popular during the 1990 s because of their important advantages, linked cache coherence protocols have gone completely unnoticed in the multicore wave. In this work we bring them in the spotlight, demonstrating that they are a good alternative to other solutions being proposed nowadays. In particular, we consider in this work the case for a simply-linked list-based cache coherence protocol and propose two techniques, namely Concurrent Replacements (CR) and Opportunistic Replacements (OR), aimed at palliating the negative effects of replacements of clean data. Through detailed simulations of several SPLASH-2 and PARSEC applications, we demonstrate that, armed with CR and OR, simply-linked list-based protocols are able to offer the performance of a non-scalable bit-vector directory at the same time that scalability to larger core counts is preserved.
This work has been supported by the Spanish MINECO, as well as European Commission FEDER funds, under grants “TIN2012-38341-C04-03” and “TIN2015-66972-C5-3-R”, and by the Fundación Séneca-Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia under grant “19295/PI/14”.
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- 1.
Without generality loss, we assume private L1 caches in each core and an inclusive, shared L2 cache distributed between them.
- 2.
In the case of clean shared replacements, the writeback buffer only needs to store the sharing information, not the data. Due to its very small size in List, this information may alternatively be kept in a miss status holding register (MSHR) or similar structure.
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Fernández-Pascual, R., Ros, A., Acacio, M.E. (2016). Optimization of a Linked Cache Coherence Protocol for Scalable Manycore Coherence. In: Hannig, F., Cardoso, J.M.P., Pionteck, T., Fey, D., Schröder-Preikschat, W., Teich, J. (eds) Architecture of Computing Systems – ARCS 2016. ARCS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9637. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30695-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30695-7_8
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