A Chained-Directory Cache Choerence Protocol for Multiprocessors

In this paper, a chained-directory cache coherence protocol for a shared-memory multiprocessor sys tem is proposed, which uses linked lists to store the informa tion for the coherence maintenance. The proposed scheme uses small memory space and has high scalability, and it requires less memory accesses by distributing the coherence maintenance to caches. We evaluated the performance of the proposed scheme, and compared it with those of two other directory-based schemes; the singly-linked list and the fullmap schemes. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme provides better processor utilization and results in less memory contention.