Title: HourGlass: Predictable Time-based Cache Coherence Protocol for Dual-Critical Multi-Core Systems,
Abstract: We present a hardware mechanism called HourGlass to predictably share data in
a multi-core system where cores are explicitly designated as critical or
non-critical. HourGlass is a time-based cache coherence protocol for
dual-critical multi-core systems that ensures worst-case latency (WCL) bounds
for memory requests originating from critical cores. Although HourGlass does
not provide either WCL or bandwidth guarantees for memory requests from
non-critical cores, it promotes the use of timers to improve its bandwidth
utilization while still maintaining WCL bounds for critical cores. This
encourages a trade-off between the WCL bounds for critical cores, and the
improved memory bandwidth for non-critical cores via timer configurations. We
evaluate HourGlass using gem5, and with multithreaded benchmark suites
including SPLASH-2, and synthetic workloads. Our results show that the WCL for
critical cores with HourGlass is always within the analytical WCL bounds, and
provides a tighter WCL bound on critical cores compared to the state-of-the-art
real-time cache coherence protocol. Further, we show that HourGlass enables a
trade-off between provable WCL bounds for critical cores, and improved
bandwidth utilization for non-critical cores. The average-case performance of
HourGlass is comparable to the state-of-the-art real-time cache coherence
protocol, and suffers a slowdown of 1.43x and 1.46x compared to the
conventional MSI and MESI protocols.