Background: Multiprocessor Architecture
Understand the fundamentals of multiprocessor architecture including hardware caches, temporal and spatial locality, and the cache coherence problem. Learn how multiple CPUs share memory and how hardware ensures data consistency across caches to support efficient multi-CPU scheduling.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
Hardware caches
To understand the new issues surrounding multiprocessor scheduling, we have to understand a new and fundamental difference between single-CPU hardware and multi-CPU hardware. This difference centers around the use of hardware caches (see figure below), and exactly how data is shared across multiple processors. We now discuss this issue further, at a high level. Details are available ...