Simulation and Performance Analysis of the MemGlue Protocol

Abstract

To increase performance, architectural heterogeneity is increasing which allows specialized components to operate more efficiently. These components often communicate through shared memory. Currently, memory consistency is difficult to reason about and implement without sacrificing performance in shared memory systems with heterogeneous components. This paper proposes a new memory consistency protocol, MemGlue, that enforces the C11 high-level language memory model to different architectural targets. MemGlue uses logical timestamps and network ordering to enforce heterogeneous consistency. By simulating MemGlue, we show that it is a hardware-efficient solution that can enforce heterogeneous memory consistency without significantly sacrificing performance in comparison to a traditional directory coherence protocol.