Abstract-This work addresses the challenge of allowing simultaneous and predictable accesses to shared data on multi-core systems. We accomplish this by proposing a predictable cache coherence protocol, which mandates the use of certain invariants to ensure predictability. In particular, we enforce these invariants by augmenting the classic modify-share-invalid (MSI) protocol with transient coherence states, and minimal architectural changes. This allows us to derive worst-case latency bounds on predictable MSI (PMSI) protocol. Our analysis shows that while the arbitration latency scales linearly, the coherence latency scales quadratically with the number of cores. We implement PMSI in gem5, and execute SPLASH-2 and synthetic multi-threaded workloads. Our empirical results show that our approach is always within the analytical worst-case latency bounds, and that PMSI improves average-case performance by up to 4× over the next best predictable alternative. PMSI has average slowdowns of 1.45× and 1.46× compared to conventional MSI and MESI protocols, respectively.

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We explore techniques to reverse-engineer properties of DRAM memory controllers (MCs). This includes page policies, address mapping schemes and command arbitration schemes. There are several benefits to knowing this information: they allow analysis techniques to effectively compute worst-case bounds, and they allow customizations to be made in software for predictability. We develop a latency-based analysis, and use this analysis to devise algorithms for micro-benchmarks to extract properties of MCs. In order to cover a breadth of page policies, address mappings and command arbitration schemes, we explore our technique using a micro-architecture simulation framework and document our findings.

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