HIERARCHICAL DIRECTORY-BASED SHARED-MEMORY ARCHITECTURE

We describe the design of a directory-based shared memory architecture on a hierarchical network of hypercubes. The distributed directory sc heme comprises two separate hierarchical networks for handling cache r equests and transfers. Further, the scheme assumes a single address sp ace and each processing element views the entire network as contiguous memory space. The size of individual directories stored at each node of the network remains constant throughout the network. Although the s ize of the directory increases with the network size, the architecture is scalable. The results of the analytical studies demonstrate superi or performance characteristics of our scheme compared with those of ot her schemes.