A dynamic cache sub-lock design to reduce false sharing

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Parallel applications suffer from significant bus traffic due to the transfer of shared data. Large block sizes exploit locality and decrease the effective memory access time. It also has a tendency to group data together even though only a part of it is needed by any one processor. This is known as the false sharing problem. This research presents a dynamic sub-block coherence protocol which minimizes false sharing by trying to dynamically locate the point of false reference. Sharing traffic is minimized by maintaining coherence on smaller blocks (sub-blocks) which are truly shared, whereas larger blocks are used as the basic units of transfer. Larger blocks exploit locality while coherence is maintained on sub-blocks which minimize bus traffic due to shared misses. The simulation results indicate that the dynamic sub-block protocol reduces the false sharing misses by 20 to 40 percent over fixed sub-block scheme