Some Considerations About Passive Sharing in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

In a multiprocessor system, process migration guarantees load balance between processors but causes passive sharing, since private data blocks of a process can become resident in multiple caches and generate useless coherence-related overhead. We propose a selective invalidation strategy to eliminate these passive shared copies. The results of trace-driven simulation prove that our strategy can result successful in a number of situations such as the typical case of a general-purpose workstation.