Effectiveness of Private Caches in Multiprocessor Systems with Parallel-Pipelined Memories

A possible design alternative for improving the performance of a multiprocessor system is to insert a private cache between each processor and the shared memory. The caches act as high-speed buffers by reducing the effective memory access time, and affect the delays caused by memory conflicts. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of caches in a multiprocessor system. The shared memory is pipelined and interleaved to improve the block transfer rate, and it assumes a two-dimensional organization, previously studied under random and word access. An approximate model is developed to estimate the processor utilization and the speed-up improvement provided by the caches.