A performance evaluation of cluster architectures
Pages 237 - 247
Abstract
This paper investigates the performance of shared-memory cluster-based architectures where each cluster is a shared-bus multiprocessor augmented with a protocol processor maintaining cache coherence across clusters. For a given number of processors, sixteen in this study, we evaluate the performance of various cluster configurations. We also consider the impact of adding a remote shared cache in each cluster. We use Mean Value Analysis to estimate the cache miss latencies of various types and the overall execution time. The service demands of shared resources are characterized in detail by examining the sub-requests issued in resolving cache misses. In addition to the architectural system parameters and the service demands on resources, the analytical model needs parameters pertinent to applications. The latter, in particular cache miss profiles, are obtained by trace-driven simulation of three benchmarks.Our results show that without remote caches the performance of cluster-based architectures is mixed. In some configurations, the negative effects of the longer latency of inter-cluster misses and of the contention on the protocol processor are too large to counter-balance the lower contention on the data buses. For two out of the three applications best results are obtained when the system has clusters of size 2 or 4. The cluster-based architectures with remote caches consistently outperform the single bus system for all 3 applications. We also exercise the model with parameters reflecting the current trend in technology making the processor relatively faster than the bus and memory. Under these new conditions, our results show a clear performance advantage for the cluster-based architectures, with or without remote caches, over single bus systems.
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Information
Published In
June 1997
298 pages
ISSN:0163-5999
DOI:10.1145/258623
- Chairmen:
- John Zahorjan,
- Albert Greenberg,
- Editor:
- Scott Leutenegger
June 1997302 pages
Copyright © 1997 ACM.
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Publication History
Published: 01 June 1997
Published in SIGMETRICS Volume 25, Issue 1
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