A Reconfigurable Cache Consistency Mechanism for Distributed Memory Pool

In distributed memory systems, caching is an effective way for reducing the latency of remote memory accesses. However, a single cache consistency mechanism often fails to efficiently adapt to the access behaviors of various workloads. We propose a hybrid and reconfigurable cache consistency mechanism for distributed heterogeneous memory pool systems, which has advantages of both directory-based and broadcast-based cache consistency mechanisms. We use the four-quadrant matrix analysis method to analyze the access pattern of each object, and then adopt the most efficient cache consistency mechanism. Moreover, the adopted cache consistency mechanism can be dynamically shifted to another mechanism based on the change of memory access pattern. Experimental results show that the reconfigurable hybrid cache consistency mechanism can improve the read and write performance of distributed heterogeneous memory pool systems by 32.31% and 31.20% on average, respectively, compared with a single cache consistency mechanism. Moreover, the hybrid cache consistency mechanism shows good scalability when the number of clients increases.