A survey of software solutions for maintenance of cache consistency in shared memory multiprocessors

Presents a comprehensive survey of software solutions for the maintenance of cache consistency in shared-memory multiprocessor systems. The lack of widely known, acceptably systematic, and flexible classification in this research field has been our basic motivation for this work. We have proposed a classification based on a set of ten carefully selected criteria that we considered most relevant. Existing solutions have been described and decomposed on the basis of this classification. Different solutions correspond to various points of an abstract multidimensional criterion-space. Such generalized approach enables the points corresponding to nonexistent but potentially useful solutions to be noticed and selected for exploration.