Equilibrium point analysis of memory interference in multiprocessor systems

An approximate analytic tool called equilibrium point analysis is applied to the problem of memory interference in multiprocessor systems. It is a simple and powerful analytic tool based on the fluid approximation and has been widely used for packet broadcast systems. It is shown that quite general multiprocessor systems can be studied quite simply with this technique, these systems include those made up of many classes of processors and memory modules with arbitrary static memory reference patterns, and systems with bus connections between processors and memories. In most cases, the approximation is shown to be sufficiently good. One of the advantages of this technique is that the error is smaller for larger systems for which no appropriate analytic tools have existed until now