An evaluation of multiprocessor cache coherence based on virtual memory support

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of the impact of several architectural parameters on the performance of virtual memory (VM) based cache coherence schemes for shared-memory multiprocessors. The VM-based cache coherence schemes use the traditional VM translation hardware on each processor to detect memory access attempts that might leave caches incoherent, and maintain coherence through VM-level system software. The implementation of this class of coherence schemes is flexible and economical: it allows different consistency models, requires no special hardware for multiprocessor cache coherence, and supports arbitrary interconnection networks. We used trace-driven simulations to evaluate the effect of the architectural parameters on the performance of the VM-based schemes. These parameters include VM page sizes. Write-back and write-through caches, memory access latencies, bus and crossbar interconnections, and different cache sizes. Our results show that VM-based cache coherence can be a very practical approach for building shared-memory multiprocessors. >