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. This is a simple and powerful analytic tool based on the fluid approximation. It has been used widely in packet broadcast systems. It is shown that quite general multiprocessor systems can be studied by this technique with amazing simplicity. For example, systems made up of many classes of processors and memory modules with arbitrary static memory reference patterns and systems with dynamic memory reference patterns are considered. In most cases, the approximation of the analysis is shown to be sufficiently good. One of the advantages of this technique is that the error is smaller for larger systems for which there have been no appropriate analytic tools thus far.