An evaluation of hardware-based and compiler-controlled optimizations of snooping cache protocols

Abstract Coherence misses and invalidation traffic limit the performance of bus-based multiprocessors using write-invalidate snooping caches. This paper considers optimizations of a write-invalidate protocol that remove such overhead. While coherence misses are attacked by a hybrid update/invalidate protocol and another technique where update instructions are selectively inserted by a compiler, invalidation traffic is reduced by three optimizations that coalesce ownership acquisition with miss handling: migrate-on-dirty, an adaptive hardware-based scheme, and compiler-controlled insertion of load-exclusive instructions. The relative effectiveness of these optimizations are evaluated using detailed architectural simulations and a set of four parallel programs. We find that while both of the update-based schemes effectively remove most coherence misses, the hybrid update/invalidate scheme causes lower traffic. By contrast, the compiler-based approach to cut invalidation traffic is slightly more efficient than the adaptive hardware-based scheme. Moreover, the migrate-on-dirty heuristic is found to have devastating effects on the miss rate.