The shared regions approach to software cache coherence on multiprocessors

The effective management of caches is critical to the performance of applications on shared-memory multiprocessors. In this paper, we discuss a technique for software cache coherence tht is based upon the integration of a program-level abstraction for shared data with software cache management. The program-level abstraction, called Shared Regions, explicitly relates synchronization objects with the data they protect. Cache coherence algorithms are presented which use the information provided by shared region primitives, and ensure that shared regions are always cacheable by the processors accessing them. Measurements and experiments of the Shared Region approach on a shared-memory multiprocessors accessing them. Measurements and experiments of the Shared Region approach on a shared-memory multiprocessor are shown. Comparisons with other software based coherence strategies, including a user-controlled strategy and an operating system-based strategy, show that this approach is able to deliver better performance, with relatively low corresponding overhead and only a small increase in the programming effort. Compared to a compiler-based coherence strategy, the Shared Regions approach still performs better than a compiler that can achieve 90% accuracy in allowing cacheing, as long as the regions are a few hundred bytes or larger, or they are re-used a few times in the cache.

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