Mobile Home Node: Improving Directory Cache Coherence Performance in NoCs via Exploitation of Producer-Consumer Relationships

Abstract

The implementation of multiple processors on a single chip has been made possible with advancements in process technology. The benefits of having multiple cores on a single chip bring with it a new set of constraints for maintaining fast and consistent memory accesses. Cache coherence protocols are needed to maintain the consistency of shared memory on individual caches. Current cache coherency protocols are either snoop based, which is not scalable but provides fast access for small number of cores, or directory based, which involves a directory that acts as the ordering point providing scalability with relatively slower access. Our focus is on improving the memory access time of the scalable directory protocol. We have observed that most memory requests follow a pattern where in one of the processors, which we will dub the Producer, repeatedly writes to a particular memory location. A subset of the remaining cores, which we will dub the Consumers, repeatedly read the data from that same memory location. In our implementation we utilize this relationship to provide direct cache to cache transfers and minimize the access time by avoiding the indirection through the directory. We move the directory temporarily to the Producer node so that the consumer can directly request the producer for the cache line. Our technique improves the memory access time by 13 percent and reduces network traffic by 30 percent over standard directory coherence protocol with very little area overhead.