Performance Evaluation of Memory Caches in Multiprocessors

Large-scale MIN-based shared-memory multiprocessor systems have long shared memory latency. Private caches can improve memory access latency but they may suf fer from the cache coherence problem and potentially lower data locality due to data sharing and multiproces sor scheduling. These two problems also increase shared memory load and may result in frequent memory stalls. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of memory caches, a cache memory placed in front of shared memory, in a large-scale multiprocessor system in the presence of pro cessor caches. The memory cache is shown to have good performance and scalability.