Design And Performance Of A Coherent Cache For Parallel Logic Programming Architectures

Abstract

This paper describes the design and performance of a tightly- coupled shared-memory coherent cache optimized for the ex- ecution of parallel logic programming architectures. The cache utilizes a copy-back write-allocation protocol having five states and a hardware lock mechanism. Optimizations for logic programming are introduced in four software controlled memory access commands: direct-write, exclusive-read, read-purge, and read-invalidate. In this paper we describe these operations and present simulated measurements showing their performance advantage for an architecture of the committed-choice language KL1 The cache optimizations also improve the performance of non-committed-choice languages, such as OR-parallel Prolog. A version of the cache design described here is currently being implemented for ICOT's Parallel Inference Machine (PIM).