Enhancing the SCI Cache Coherence Protocol for Multiprocessor Clusters

Abstract

In this paper, we designed a cache coherence protocol for clustered multiprocessors. This protocol combines the IEEE SCI cache coherence protocol [7] with Writhe-Once protocol [5]. To evaluate and verify this protocol, we implemented this protocol on the PROTEUS parallel-architecture simulation system [2]. In addition, we used the enhanced PROTEUS system to investigate the performance differentiation between clustered, bus-based, and network-based multiprocessor systems. Through simulations, we found that the performance of the clustered multiprocessor is the best on heavily memory-loaded benchmarks.