Efficient Timestamp-Based Cache Coherence Protocol for Many-Core Architectures

As we enter the era of many-core, providing the shared memory abstraction through cache coherence has become progressively difficult. The de-facto standard directory-based cache coherence has been extensively studied; but it does not scale well with increasing core count. Timestamp-based hardware coherence protocols introduced recently offer an attractive alternative solution. In this paper, we propose a timestamp-based coherence protocol, called TC-Release++, that addresses the scalability issues of efficiently supporting cache coherence in large-scale systems.

Our approach is inspired by TC-Weak, a recently proposed timestamp-based coherence protocol targeting GPU architectures. We first design TC-Release coherence in an attempt to straightforwardly port TC-Weak to general-purpose many-cores. But re-purposing TC-Weak for general-purpose many-core architectures is challenging due to significant differences both in architecture and the programming model. Indeed the performance of TC-Release turns out to be worse than conventional directory coherence protocols. We overcome the limitations and overheads of TC-Release by introducing simple hardware support to eliminate frequent memory stalls, and an optimized life-time prediction mechanism to improve cache performance. The resulting optimized coherence protocol TC-Release++ is highly scalable (overhead for coherence per last-level cache line scales logarithmically with core count as opposed to linearly for directory coherence) and shows better execution time (3.0%) and comparable network traffic (within 1.3%) relative to the baseline MESI directory coherence protocol.