A lock-based cache coherence protocol for scope consistency

Directory protocols are widely adopted to maintain cache coherence of distributed shared memory multiprocessors. Although scalable to a certain extent, directory protocols are complex enough to prevent it from being used in very large scale multiprocessors with tens of thousands of nodes. This paper proposes a lock-based cache coherence protocol for scope consistency. It does not rely on directory information to maintain cache coherence. Instead, cache coherence is maintained through requiring the releasing processor of a lock to store all write-notices generated in the associated critical section to the lock and the acquiring processor invalidates or updates its locally cached data copies according to the write notices of the lock. To evaluate the performance of the lock-based cache coherence protocol, a software DSM system named JIAJIA is built on network of workstations. Besides the lock-based cache coherence protocol, JIAJIA also characterizes itself with its shared memory organization scheme which combines the physical memories of multiple workstations to form a large shared space. Performance measurements with SPLASH2 program suite and NAS benchmarks indicate that, compared to recent SVM systems such as CVM, higher speedup is achieved by JIAJIA. Besides, JIAJIA can solve large scale problems that cannot be solved by other SVM systems due to memory size limitation.