Cache protocols with partial block invalidations
- 31 December 2002
- proceedings article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
The authors introduce hardware cache protocols in which invalidations affect only part of a cached block so that the processor can keep reading the valid part. On a cache miss the entire block is fetched in the cache. The proposed protocols take advantage of the prefetching effects associated with large block sizes while reducing the false sharing miss rate. It does not rely on synchronization as other previous proposals do and therefore it is applicable to systems under any memory consistency model including sequential consistency. Simulation results show that protocols with partial block invalidations may provide significant miss rate and memory traffic reductions over protocols with invalidations of entire blocks. The hardware cost is low and the protocol complexity is only marginally increased.Keywords
This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- A characterization of sharing in parallel programs and its application to coherency protocol evaluationPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2003
- Weak ordering-a new definitionPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- The directory-based cache coherence protocol for the DASH multiprocessorPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Adaptive software cache management for distributed shared memory architecturesPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Cache invalidation patterns in shared-memory multiprocessorsIEEE Transactions on Computers, 1992
- Delayed consistency and its effects on the miss rate of parallel programsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1991
- Memory access dependencies in shared-memory multiprocessorsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1990
- Using cache memory to reduce processor-memory trafficPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1983
- A New Solution to Coherence Problems in Multicache SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers, 1978