A Performance Evaluation of Cluster-based Architectures

This paper investigates the performance of shared-memory cluster-based architectures where each cluster is a shared-bus multiprocessor augmented with a protocol processor maintaining cache coherence across clusters. For a given number of processors, sixteen in this study, we evaluate the performance of various cluster configurations. We also consider the impact of adding a remote shared cache in each cluster. We use Mean Value Analysis to estimate the cache miss latencies of various types and the overall execution time. The service demands of shared resources are characterized in detail by examining the sub-requests issued in resolving cache misses. In addition to the architectural system parameters and the service demands on resources, the analytical model needs parameters pertinent to applications. The latter, in particular cache miss profiles, are obtained by trace-driven simulation of three benchmarks. Our results show that without remote caches the performance of cluster-based arc..