JISE


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Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 123-135


Shared Translation Lookaside Buffers on Multiprocessors and a Performance Study


Wei-Tsung Sun, Yunn-Yen Chen, Jih-Kwon Peir and Chung-Ta King
Department of Computer Science 
National Tsing Hua University 
Hsinchu, Taiwan 30043, R.O.C


    The conventional private translation lookaside buffer (TLB) design in a multiprocessor system may create the TLB consistency problem. One way to avoid the problem is to use shared TLBs. In this paper, we will discuss a design for shared TLBs for shared-memory multiprocessors. The performance of the proposed shared TLB design is evaluated using the trace-driven technique. The traces are collected from general-purpose applications [1,8]. Results from the simulation show that the shared TLB approach, in general, has a lower TLB miss ratio than does the private TLB solution. For example, using a 4-way set-associative TLB and keeping the total size of TLBs fixed, the miss ratios using shared TLBs of size 64×n pages, where n is the number of processors in the system, are 4%, 14%, and 37% lower than the miss ratios using private TLBs in a 2-,4-, and 8- processor system, respectively. The results also indicate that the shared TLB design can achieve roughly the same miss ratio by using about half the total size of private TLBs.


Keywords: address translation, interconnection network, translation lookaside buffer, virtual memory system, multiprocessor system

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