The effect of seance communication on multiprocessing systems

This paper introduces the seance communication phenomenon and analyzes its effect on a multiprocessing environment. Seance communication is an unnecessary coherency-related activity that is associated with dead cache information. Dead information may reside in the cache for various reasons: task migration, context switches, or working-set changes. Dead information does not have a significant performance impact on a single-processor system; however, it can dominate the performance of multicache environment. In order to evaluate the overhead of seance communication, we develop an analytical model that is based on the fractal behavior of the memory references. So far, all previous works that used the same modeling approach extracted the fractal parameters of a program manually. This paper provides an additional important contribution by demonstrating how these parameters can be automatically extracted from the program trace. Our analysis indicates that Seance communication may severely reduce the overall system performance when using write-update or write-invalidate cache coherency protocols. In addition, we find that the performance of write-update protocols is affected more severely than write-invalidate protocols. The results that are provided by our model are important for better understanding of the coherency-related overhead in multicache systems and for better development of parallel applications and operating systems.

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