Analysis of multiprocessor memory reference behavior

The performance of shared-memory, cache-coherent multiprocessors is a strong function of the reference behavior within multiprocessor applications. This research characterizes the memory reference behavior in a wide variety of scalar and vector multiprocessor traces, to estimate and improve the performance of cache-consistency protocols. We find wide differences between the sharing behavior observed in vector and scalar applications. Compared to scalar programs, vector programs reference shared data more frequently and contain larger amounts of processor locality. Write sharing by different processors over short time intervals are infrequent in one workload but frequent in another. The latter result implies that sequentially-consistent programming models will remain necessary unless applications are recoded to avoid such reference patterns