Lee Dong Kwang, Kweon Hyek Seong, Choi Seong Min, Ahn Byoung Chul

The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society (1994 ~ 2000), Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 1098-1105, Apr. 1999
10.3745/KIPSTE.1999.6.4.1098,   PDF Download:

Abstract

The caches in distributed shared memory systems enhance the performance by reducing memory access latency and communication overhead, but they must solve the cache coherence problem. This paper proposes a new directory protocol to solve the cache coherence problem and to improve the system performance in distributed shared memory systems. To maintain the cache coherence of shared data, processors within a limited distance reduce the communication overhead by using a bit-vector like the full directory scheme. Processors over a limited distance store pointers in a directory pool. Since the bit-vector and the directory pool remove the unnecessary cache invalidations, the proposed scheme reduces the communication traffic and improves the system performance. The dynamic limited directory scheme reduces the communication traffic up to 66 percents compared with the limited directory scheme and the number of directory access up to 27 percents compared with the dynamic pointer allocation scheme.

Statistics
Cite this article