DiCo-CMP: Efficient cache coherency in tiled CMP architectures

Future CMP designs that will integrate tens of processor cores on-chip will be constrained by area and power. Area constraints make impractical the use of a bus or a crossbar as the on-chip interconnection network, and tiled CMPs organized around a direct interconnection network will probably be the architecture of choice. Power constraints make impractical to rely on broadcasts (as Token-CMP does) or any other brute-force method for keeping cache coherence, and directory-based cache coherence protocols are currently being employed. Unfortunately, directory protocols introduce indirection to access directory information, which negatively impacts performance. In this work, we present DiCo-CMP, a novel cache coherence protocol especially suited to future tiled CMP architectures. In DiCo- CMP the role of storing up-to-date sharing information and ensuring totally ordered accesses for every memory block is assigned to the cache that must provide the block on a miss. Therefore, DiCo-CMP reduces the miss latency compared to a directory protocol by sending coherence messages directly from the requesting caches to those that must observe them (as it would be done in brute-force protocols), and reduces the network traffic compared to Token-CMP (and consequently, power consumption in the interconnection network) by sending just one request message for each miss. Using an extended version of GEMS simulator we show that DiCo-CMP achieves improvements in execution time of up to 8% on average over a directory protocol, and reductions in terms of network traffic of up to 42% on average compared to Token-CMP.