1994 International Conference on Parallel Processing A Distributed Cache Coherence Protocol for Hypercube Multiprocessors*

A b s t r a c t- This paper proposes a distributed directory cache coherence protocol and compares the performance of the proposed protocol with fully mapped and single linked list protocols for the hyper cube multiprocessors. The directories of shared blocks are maintained as a tree structure which is motivated by the similarity of the indirect binary n-cube to the direct binary n-cube. The proposed protocol also takes advantage of the wormhole routing technique. Compared to the fully mapped and single linked list schemes, the proposed protocol reduces the memory reference latency and the network traffic. 1 Introduct ion Shared memory multiprocessors have become pop ular because of their simple programming model. Th