Do Software Caches Work? Performance Analysis of the I-Structure Software Cache on Multi-Threading Systems
Wen-Yen Lin, Jean-Luc Gaudiot, José Nelson Amaral, and Guang
R. Gao
Non-Blocking Multithreaded execution models have been proposed as
an effective means to overlap computation and communication in
distributed memory systems without any hardware support. Split-phase
operations are used to enable the tolerance of request latencies by a
decoupling between the initiators and the receivers of
communication/synchronization transactions. However, each request
still incurs the cost of communication interface overhead. We
therefore designed and implemented our I-Structure Software Cache
system to further reduce communication overhead for non-blocking
multithreaded execution.
In this paper, we present analytical models for the performances of a
multithreading system with and without I-Structure Software Cache
support. We compare our model's prediction with our experimental
results on an existing multithreaded architecture platform. The
analytical models allow us to predict at what ratio of communication
latency/processing speed the implementation of I-Structure Software
Cache becomes profitable for applications with different
characteristics.
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