In the field of supercomputing, one key issue for scal-able shared-memory multiprocessors is the design of the directory which denotes the sharing state for a cache block. A good direc-tory design intends to achieve t...In the field of supercomputing, one key issue for scal-able shared-memory multiprocessors is the design of the directory which denotes the sharing state for a cache block. A good direc-tory design intends to achieve three key attributes： reasonable memory overhead, sharer position precision and implementation complexity. However, researchers often face the problem that gain-ing one attribute may result in losing another. The paper proposes an elastic pointer directory （EPD） structure based on the analysis of shared-memory applications, taking the fact that the number of sharers for each directory entry is typical y smal . Analysis re-sults show that for 4 096 nodes, the ratio of memory overhead to the ful-map directory is 2.7%. Theoretical analysis and cycle-accurate execution-driven simulations on a 16 and 64-node cache coherence non uniform memory access （CC-NUMA） multiproces-sor show that the corresponding pointer overflow probability is reduced significantly. The performance is observed to be better than that of a limited pointers directory and almost identical to the ful-map directory, except for the slight implementation complex-ity. Using the directory cache to explore directory access locality is also studied. The experimental result shows that this is a promis-ing approach to be used in the state-of-the-art high performance computing domain.展开更多
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(6123200961370059)+1 种基金the High Technology Research and Development Program of China(863 Program)(2011AA01A205)the Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment(SKLSDE2012ZX06)
文摘In the field of supercomputing, one key issue for scal-able shared-memory multiprocessors is the design of the directory which denotes the sharing state for a cache block. A good direc-tory design intends to achieve three key attributes： reasonable memory overhead, sharer position precision and implementation complexity. However, researchers often face the problem that gain-ing one attribute may result in losing another. The paper proposes an elastic pointer directory （EPD） structure based on the analysis of shared-memory applications, taking the fact that the number of sharers for each directory entry is typical y smal . Analysis re-sults show that for 4 096 nodes, the ratio of memory overhead to the ful-map directory is 2.7%. Theoretical analysis and cycle-accurate execution-driven simulations on a 16 and 64-node cache coherence non uniform memory access （CC-NUMA） multiproces-sor show that the corresponding pointer overflow probability is reduced significantly. The performance is observed to be better than that of a limited pointers directory and almost identical to the ful-map directory, except for the slight implementation complex-ity. Using the directory cache to explore directory access locality is also studied. The experimental result shows that this is a promis-ing approach to be used in the state-of-the-art high performance computing domain.
