Coarse-Grain Coherence Tracking: RegionScout and Region Coherence Arrays

Author

Cantin, Jason F. ; Smith, James E. ; Lipasti, Mikko H. ; Moshovos, Andreas ; Falsafi, Babak

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Wisconsin Univ., Madison, WI

Volume

26

Issue

1

fYear

2006

Firstpage

70

Lastpage

79

Abstract

Cache-coherent shared-memory multiprocessors have wide-ranging applications, from commercial transaction processing and database services to large-scale scientific computing. Coarse-grain coherence tracking (CGCT) is a new technique that extends a conventional coherence mechanism and optimizes coherence enforcement. It monitors the coherence status of large regions of memory and uses that information to avoid unnecessary broadcasts and filter unnecessary cache tag lookups, thus improving system performance and power consumption. This article presents two CGCT implementations, RegionScout and Region Coherence Arrays, and provides simulation results for a broadcast-based multiprocessor system running commercial, scientific, and multiprogrammed workloads

Keywords

cache storage; power consumption; shared memory systems; CGCT technique; Region Coherence Arrays; RegionScout; broadcast-based multiprocessor system; cache tag lookups; cache-coherent shared-memory multiprocessors; coarse-grain coherence tracking; coherence enforcement optimization; power consumption; system performance; Bandwidth; Broadcasting; Coherence; Delay; Hardware; Large-scale systems; Multiprocessing systems; Power system interconnection; System performance; Transaction databases; RegionScout; cache tag lookups; coarse-grain coherence tracking; power consumption; region coherence arrays;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Micro, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0272-1732

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MM.2006.8

Filename

1603499