CRPC-TR93560-S: Cache Coherence Using Local Knowledge

Ervan Darnell
Ken Kennedy

Coherence hardware has a global nature, that is each cache must
communicate with every other at run-time to maintain coherence.
Strategies for effecting this suffer significant time or storage
overhead. Instead, compile-time directed decisions plus some local
run-time cache knowledge gathered using special hardware can achieve
hit rates nearly as good as global strategies. Local strategies suffer
no network or contention delays to perform coherence.  Additional
storage cost is also minimal. This paper presents an algorithm that is
ideal in the sense that no local strategy could ever achieve a higher
hit rate, for a given level of compiler analysis.

Appeared in Supercomputing '93.