Adaptive Software Cache Management for Distributed Shared Memory Architectures

An adaptive cache coherence mechanism exploits semantic information about the expected or observed access behavior of particular data objects. We contend that, in distributed shared memory systems, adaptive cache coherence mechanisms will outperform static cache coherence mechanisms. We have examined the sharing and synchronization behavior of a variety of shared memory parallel programs. We have found that the access patterns of a large percentage of shared data objects fall in a small number of categories for which efficient software coherence mechanisms exist. In addition, we have performed a simulation study that provides two examples of how an adaptive caching mechanism can take advantage of semantic information. 1 Introduction We are developing Munin [4], a system that will allow programs written for shared memorymultiprocessors to be executed efficiently on distributed memory machines. What distinguishes Munin from previous distributed shared memory systems [6, 12, 14] is the ..