As the number of cores in a chip multiprocessor (CMP) increases, the need for larger on-chip caches also increases in order to avoid creating a bottleneck at the off-chip interconnect. Utilization of these CMPs include combinations of multithreading and multiprogramming, showing a range of sharing behavior, from frequent inter-thread communication to no communication. The goal of the CMP cache design is to maximize capacity for a given size while providing as low a latency as possible for the entire range of sharing behavior. In a typical CMP design, the last level cache (LLC) is shared across the cores and incurs a latency of access that is a function of distance on the chip. Sharing helps avoid the need for replicas at the LLC and allows access to the entire on-chip cache space by any core. However, the cost is the increased latency of communication based on where data is mapped on the chip. In this paper, we propose a cache coherence design we call POPS that provides localized data and metadata access for both shared data (in multithreaded workloads) and private data (predominant in multiprogrammed workloads). POPS achieves its goal by (1) decoupling data and metadata, allowing both to be delegated to local LLC slices for private data and between sharers for shared data, (2) freeing delegated data storage in the LLC for larger effective capacity, and (3) changing the delegation and/or coherence protocol action based on the observed sharing pattern. Our analysis on an execution-driven full system simulator using multithreaded and multiprogrammed workloads shows that POPS performs 42% (28% without micro benchmarks) better for multithreaded workloads, 16% better for multiprogrammed workloads, and 8% better when one single-threaded application is the only running process, compared to the base non-uniform shared L2 protocol. POPS has the added benefits of reduced on-chip and off-chip traffic and reduced dynamic energy consumption.

In order to harness the full compute power of many-core processors, future designs must focus on effective utilization of on-chip cache and bandwidth resources. In this paper, we address the dual goals of (1) reducing on-chip communication overheads and (2) improving on-chip cache space utilization resulting in larger effective cache capacity and thereby potentially reduced off-chip traffic. We present a new cache coherence protocol that decouples the logical binding between data and metadata in a cache set. This decoupling allows data and metadata for a cache line to be independently delegated to any location on chip. By delegating metadata to the current owner/modifier of a cache line, communication overhead for metadata maintenance is avoided and communication can be effectively localized between interacting processes. By decoupling metadata from data, data space in the cache can be more efficiently utilized by avoiding unnecessary data replication. Using full system simulation, we demonstrate that our decoupled protocol achieves an average (geometric mean) speedup of 1.24 (1.3 with microbenchmarks) compared to a base statically mapped directory-based non-uniform cache access protocol, while generating only 65% and 74% of the on-chip and off-chip traffic respectively, and consuming 74% of the corresponding energy (95% of the power) in the on-chip memory and interconnect compared to the base system.

Both commercial and scientific workloads benefit from concurrency and exhibit data sharing across threads/processes. The resulting sharing patterns are often fine-grain, with the modified cache lines still residing in the writer's primary cache when accessed. Chip multiprocessors present an opportunity to optimize for fine-grain sharing using direct access to remote processor components through low-latency on-chip interconnects. In this paper, we present Adaptive Replication, Migration, and producer-Consumer Optimization (ARMCO), a coherence protocol that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to exploit direct access to the L1 caches of remote processors (rather than via coherence mechanisms) in order to support fine-grain sharing.

There has been considerable recent interest in the support of transactional memory (TM) in both hardware and software. We present an intermediate approach, in which hardware is used to accelerate a TM implementation controlled fundamentally by software. Our hardware support reduces the overhead of common TM tasks, namely, conflict detection and data isolation, for bounded transactions. Software control allows policy flexibility for conflict detection, contention management, and data granularity, in addition to enabling transactions unbounded in space and time. Our hardware consists of 1) an alert-on-update mechanism for fast eventbased communication, used for software-controlled conflict detection; and 2) support for programmable data isolation, allowing multiple concurrent transactional readers and writers at the software’s behest, along with fast data commit and abort support (using only a few cycles of completely local operation). Our results show that for common-case bounded transactions, the proposed hardware mechanisms eliminate data copying and dramatically reduce the overhead of bookkeeping and validation (resulting in a factor of 2 improvement in performance on average). Moreover, RTM shows good scalability as the number of threads is increased and graceful degradation in performance when transactions overflow available hardware support. Detecting conflicts eagerly (on first access) or lazily (at commit time), enabled by the ability to handle multiple concurrent transactional writers and readers, can result in differences in performance in either direction depending on the application access pattern (up to two orders of magnitude at 16 threads for one workload), demonstrating the need for policy flexibility.

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