STARRING: slotted ring-based multiprocessor system with a central directory module

The bus-based multiprocessor system is popular. As the computational workload increases, more processors must be attached to the bus. However, the bus has a limit on the number of the processors that can be attached because of electrical problems. Recently, a ring-based multiprocessor system using a point-to-point link was proposed to replace the bus-based multiprocessor system. The authors propose the STARRING, a ring-based multiprocessor system with a central directory module to better the performance. The central directory module is separated into several physical directories to prevent the bottleneck. The directory module reduces the latency of access to the remote memory. They use the program-driven simulator to evaluate the performance. The simulation results show that the STARRING outperforms the bus-based system and the ring-based system using the link-list cache coherence protocol