Summary: ­­ ­­
To appear in the Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Comparison of Hardware and Software Cache Coherence Schemes +
Sarita V. Adve, Vikram S. Adve, Mark D. Hill, Mary K. Vernon
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin­Madison
Madison, WI 53706
ABSTRACT
We use mean value analysis models to compare
representative hardware and software cache coherence
schemes for a large­scale shared­memory system. Our
goal is to identify the workloads for which either of the
schemes is significantly better. Our methodology improves
upon previous analytical studies and complements previous
simulation studies by developing a common high­level
workload model that is used to derive separate sets of low­
level workload parameters for the two schemes. This
approach allows an equitable comparison of the two
schemes for a specific workload.
Our results show that software schemes are compar­

Source: Adve, Sarita - Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hill, Mark D. - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences