EMC2: Extending Magny-Cours coherence for large-scale servers

A Ros, B Cuesta, R Fernández-Pascual… - … Conference on High …, 2010 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
A Ros, B Cuesta, R Fernández-Pascual, ME Gomez, ME Acacio, A Robles, JM García
2010 International Conference on High Performance Computing, 2010ieeexplore.ieee.org
The demand of larger and more powerful high-performance shared-memory servers is
growing over the last few years. To meet this need, AMD has recently launched the twelve-
core Magny-Cours processors. They include a directory cache (Probe Filter) that increases
the scalability of the coherence protocol applied by Opterons, based on coherent Hyper
Transport interconnect (cHT). cHT limits up to 8 the number of nodes that can be addressed.
Recent High Node Count HT specification overcomes this limitation. However, the 3-bit …
The demand of larger and more powerful high-performance shared-memory servers is growing over the last few years. To meet this need, AMD has recently launched the twelve-core Magny-Cours processors. They include a directory cache (Probe Filter) that increases the scalability of the coherence protocol applied by Opterons, based on coherent Hyper Transport interconnect (cHT). cHT limits up to 8 the number of nodes that can be addressed. Recent High Node Count HT specification overcomes this limitation. However, the 3-bit pointer used by the Probe Filter prevents Magny-Cours-based servers from being built beyond 8 nodes. In this paper, we propose and develop an external logic to extend the coherence domain of Magny-Cours processors beyond the 8-node limit while maintaining the advantages provided by the Probe Filter. Evaluation results for up to a 32-node system show how the performance offered by our solution scales with the increment in the number of nodes, enhancing the Probe Filter effectiveness by filtering additional messages. Particularly, we reduce runtime by 47% in a 32-die system respect to the 8-die Magny-Cours system.
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