In computing, a cache is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. A cache hit occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a cache miss occurs when it cannot. Cache hits are served by reading data from the cache, which is faster than recomputing a result or reading from a slower data store; thus, the more requests that can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs.
Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to the processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory. The benefits of NUMA are limited to particular workloads, notably on servers where the data is often associated strongly with certain tasks or users.
In computer architecture, cache coherence is the uniformity of shared resource data that ends up stored in multiple local caches. When clients in a system maintain caches of a common memory resource, problems may arise with incoherent data, which is particularly the case with CPUs in a multiprocessing system.
The MESI protocol is an Invalidate-based cache coherence protocol, and is one of the most common protocols that support write-back caches. It is also known as the Illinois protocol due to its development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Write back caches can save considerable bandwidth generally wasted on a write through cache. There is always a dirty state present in write-back caches that indicates that the data in the cache is different from that in the main memory. The Illinois Protocol requires a cache-to-cache transfer on a miss if the block resides in another cache. This protocol reduces the number of main memory transactions with respect to the MSI protocol. This marks a significant improvement in performance.
Bus snooping or bus sniffing is a scheme by which a coherency controller (snooper) in a cache monitors or snoops the bus transactions, and its goal is to maintain a cache coherency in distributed shared memory systems. This scheme was introduced by Ravishankar and Goodman in 1983, under the name "write-once" cache coherency. A cache containing a coherency controller (snooper) is called a snoopy cache.
Memory coherence is an issue that affects the design of computer systems in which two or more processors or cores share a common area of memory.
In computer science, distributed shared memory (DSM) is a form of memory architecture where physically separated memories can be addressed as a single shared address space. The term "shared" does not mean that there is a single centralized memory, but that the address space is shared—i.e., the same physical address on two processors refers to the same location in memory. Distributed global address space (DGAS), is a similar term for a wide class of software and hardware implementations, in which each node of a cluster has access to shared memory in addition to each node's private memory.
A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a memory cache that stores the recent translations of virtual memory to physical memory. It is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. It can be called an address-translation cache. It is a part of the chip's memory-management unit (MMU). A TLB may reside between the CPU and the CPU cache, between CPU cache and the main memory or between the different levels of the multi-level cache. The majority of desktop, laptop, and server processors include one or more TLBs in the memory-management hardware, and it is nearly always present in any processor that utilizes paged or segmented virtual memory.
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations. Most CPUs have a hierarchy of multiple cache levels, with different instruction-specific and data-specific caches at level 1. The cache memory is typically implemented with static random-access memory (SRAM), in modern CPUs by far the largest part of them by chip area, but SRAM is not always used for all levels, or even any level, sometimes some latter or all levels are implemented with eDRAM.
In computing, the MSI protocol - a basic cache-coherence protocol - operates in multiprocessor systems. As with other cache coherency protocols, the letters of the protocol name identify the possible states in which a cache line can be.
The MOSI protocol is an extension of the basic MSI cache coherency protocol. It adds the Owned state, which indicates that the current processor owns this block, and will service requests from other processors for the block.
(For a detailed description see Cache coherency protocols )
The Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) is a point-to-point processor interconnect developed by Intel which replaced the front-side bus (FSB) in Xeon, Itanium, and certain desktop platforms starting in 2008. It increased the scalability and available bandwidth. Prior to the name's announcement, Intel referred to it as Common System Interface (CSI). Earlier incarnations were known as Yet Another Protocol (YAP) and YAP+.
A write buffer is a type of data buffer that can be used to hold data being written from the cache to main memory or to the next cache in the memory hierarchy to improve performance and reduce latency. It is used in certain CPU cache architectures like Intel's x86 and AMD64. In multi-core systems, write buffers destroy sequential consistency. Some software disciplines, like C11's data-race-freedom, are sufficient to regain a sequentially consistent view of memory.
In cache coherency protocol literature, Write-Once was the first MESI protocol defined. It has the optimization of executing write-through on the first write and a write-back on all subsequent writes, reducing the overall bus traffic in consecutive writes to the computer memory. It was first described by James R. Goodman in (1983). Cache coherence protocols are an important issue in Symmetric multiprocessing systems, where each CPU maintains a cache of the memory.
The Firefly cache coherence protocol is the schema used in the DEC Firefly multiprocessor workstation, developed by DEC Systems Research Center. This protocol is a 3 State Write Update Cache Coherence Protocol. Unlike the Dragon protocol, the Firefly protocol updates the Main Memory as well as the Local caches on Write Update Bus Transition. Thus the Shared Clean and Shared Modified States present in case of Dragon Protocol, are not distinguished between in case of Firefly Protocol.
The Dragon Protocol is an update based cache coherence protocol used in multi-processor systems. Write propagation is performed by directly updating all the cached values across multiple processors. Update based protocols such as the Dragon protocol perform efficiently when a write to a cache block is followed by several reads made by other processors, since the updated cache block is readily available across caches associated with all the processors.
The MERSI protocol is a cache coherency and memory coherence protocol used by the PowerPC G4. The protocol consists of five states, Modified (M), Exclusive (E), Read Only or Recent (R), Shared (S) and Invalid (I). The M, E, S and I states are the same as in the MESI protocol. The R state is similar to the E state in that it is constrained to be the only clean, valid, copy of that data in the computer system. Unlike the E state, the processor is required to initially request ownership of the cache line in the R state before the processor may modify the cache line and transition to the M state. In both the MESI and MERSI protocols, the transition from the E to M is silent.
Directory-based coherence is a mechanism to handle cache coherence problem in distributed shared memory (DSM) a.k.a. non-uniform memory access (NUMA). Another popular way is to use a special type of computer bus between all the nodes as a "shared bus". Directory-based coherence uses a special directory to serve instead of the shared bus in the bus-based coherence protocols. Both of these designs use the corresponding medium as a tool to facilitate the communication between different nodes, and to guarantee that the coherence protocol is working properly along all the communicating nodes. In directory based cache coherence, this is done by using this directory to keep track of the status of all cache blocks, the status of each block includes in which cache coherence "state" that block is, and which nodes are sharing that block at that time, which can be used to eliminate the need to broadcast all the signals to all nodes, and only send it to the nodes that are interested in this single block.
Examples of coherency protocols for cache memory are listed here. For simplicity, all "miss" Read and Write status transactions which obviously come from state "I", in the diagrams are not shown. They are shown directly on the new state. Many of the following protocols have only historical value. At the moment the main protocols used are the R-MESI type / MESIF protocols and the HRT-ST-MESI or a subset or an extension of these.
