CoherenceDecouplingMakingUseofIncoherence.pptVIP

Coherence Decoupling: Making Use of Incoherence J. Huh, J. Chang, D. Burger, G. Sohi ASPLOS 2004 Motivation Multi-threading and Multi-processing have become common When a cache line is marked as invalid very often not all data in the line is incorrect If the data in invalid lines can be used speculatively there is a great potential for performance improvement Background Cache Coherence Protocol Used in shared-memory multiprocessors for managing correct data sharing Vital to the design of multiprocessors since it contributes the most to inter-processor communication latency Proposed Idea Separate the traditional cache coherence protocol into two parts Speculative cache lookup (SCL) – uses a speculative value from an invalid cache line thus allowing the processor to work continuously Safe coherence protocol – obtains the correct value which is then compared with the value provided by SCL Coherence Decoupling Related Work Customized Coherence Protocols Speculative Coherence Operations Dynamic self-invalidation, coherence message predictor, token coherence etc. Speculation on outcome of events in multi-processor execution Coherence Decoupling Architecture Must support the following: Split - means to split a memory op into speculative load and a coherence operation Compute - mechanisms to support execution with speculative values Recover – means to recover and rollback upon misprediction SCL Protocols for Coherence Decoupling Use a simple safe coherence protocol and rely on an aggressive SCL protocol to increase performance Two components of an SCL protocol Read component – obtains the speculative value Update component – updates an invalid cache line so subsequent speculative reads can use it (can be left out in some SCL protocols) Read vs Update components SCL protocol with only a read component can be used if the word in an invalid block has: Not changed remotely (false sharing) Changed remotely to a same value (silent stores) Changed remotely to a differ