• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.30 no.9
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• pp.461-476
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• 2003

Due to the implementation ease and alleviation of memory bottleneck effect, NUMA architecture has dominated in the multiprocessor systems for the past several years. However, because the NUMA system distributes memory in each node, frequent remote memory access is a key factor of performance degradation. Therefore, efficient design of RAC(Remote Access Cache) in NUMA system is critical for performance improvement. In this paper, we suggest Multi-Grain RAC which can adaptively control the RAC line size, with respect to each application behavior Then we simulate NUMA system with multi-grain RAC using MINT, event-driven memory hierarchy simulator. and analyze the performance results. At first, with profile-based determination method, we verify the optimal RAC line size for each application and, then, we compare and analyze the performance differences among NUMA systems with normal RAC, with optimal line size RAC, and with multi-grain RAC. The simulation shows that the worst case can be always avoided and results are very close to optimal case with any combination of application and RAC format.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.31 no.8
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• pp.473-486
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• 2004

NUMA systems have remote access caches(RAC) in each local node to reduce the overhead for repeated remote memory accesses. By this RAC, memory latency and network traffic can be reduced and the performance of the multiprocessor system can be improved. Until now, several cache replacement policies have been proposed in recent years, and there also is cache replacement policy for multiprocessor systems. In this paper, we propose a cache replacement policy which is based on cache line coherence information. In this policy, the cache line that does not have an ownership is replaced first with respect to cache line that has an ownership. Like this way, the overhead to transfer ownership is avoided and the memory latency can be decreased. We also propose “Keeping-Ownership replacement policy with MRU (KOM)” and “Keeping-Ownership replacement policy with Reference Bit(KORB)” to reduce the frequent replacement penalty of the ownership-lacking cache line. We compare and analyze these with LRU and Pseudo LRU(PLRU). The simulation shows that KOM outperforms the PLRU by 25%, and KORB outperforms the PLRU by 13%. Although the hardware cost of KOM is very small, the performance of KOM is nearly equal to that of the LRU.