A Novel Approach to the Design of Scalable Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

This paper presents the Conflict-Free Mem ory (CFM) architecture for designing scalable sharedmemory multiprocessors. For a single-level CFM archi tecture, the architecture improves multiprocessor perfor mance by eliminating memory and interconnection net work contention and reducing network latency. A hierar chical CFM architecture is introduced in this paper, which presents a new approach in implementing scalable sharedmemory multiprocessors. An invalidation-based write-back cache protocol is proposed for the CFM architecture. This cache coherence protocol preserves the low storage overhead of snoopy cache protocols, while it offers the high scalability of directory-based protocols. Furthermore, with the CFM cache protocol, efficient synchronization operations can be implemented.