Design and Implementation of the NUMAchine Multiprocessor

This paper describes the design and implementation of the NUMAchine multiprocessor. As the market for CC-NUMA multiprocessors expands, this research project provides a timely architectural design and cost-effective prototype. The key to the successful implementation of our 48-processor prototype is the use of off-the-shelf components and programmable logic devices. Since this machine will serve as a research vehicle for parallel software development, a number of hardware features to enhance experimentation have been included in the design. 1 Introduction This paper describes the hardware implementation of a multiprocessor called NUMAchine [7]. In NUMAchine, processors, caches, and memory are physically distributed throughout the system. The memory is shared by all processors, but the access latency depends on location. Hardware automatically maintains coherent copies of data throughout the system. This type of multiprocessor is known as a CC-NUMA (Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Acc..