AIKMS PROJECT TITLE:

CRAMP: Combining randomisation and mixed-policy caching for bounded-contention shared-memory

PROJECT MANAGER:

Dr P H J Kelly
Department of Computing
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
180 Queen's Gate
London
SW7 2BZ
Telephone: 0171 594 8332
e-mail: phjk@doc.ic.ac.uk

OTHER PARTICIPANTS:

ICL Ltd (contacts: Ian Colloff, Jeff Poskett, Owen Evans)
Lovelace Road
Bracknell
Berkshire
RG12 8SN
Telephone: 01344 424842

GRANT NUMBER: GR/J/99117 START DATE: 15/6/94 DURATION: three years AMOUNT: £137,488

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

PROGRESS/DELIVERABLES (AS AT 1/3/97)

FUTURE PLANS/EXPLOITATION

Current research: We are currently completing the research phase of the project, revising our designs for mixed-policy cache coherency protocols incorporating randomised data placement, using simulation and analytical modelling to study the resulting behaviour, and investigating new benchmarks.

The results take the form of protocol and policy designs, together with details of their analytical and benchmark performance characteristics. The simulation tools, benchmarks suites and workload capture techniques we are developing also have broader application.

The next step:

Exploitation: The novel protocol techniques we have been developing so far are aimed at large shared-memory configurations. This is an important long-term goal, and is likely to become more so as shared memory techniques are deployed in local area networks. In smaller-scale machines, our tools, analytical modelling work, and experience will be valuable in designing robust and cost-effective systems.

We aim through this project to develop valuable and marketable simulation and benchmarking expertise and tools, and to establish design parameters for hardware and software for large parallel computers.

Publications and Technical Reports What follows is a selection of papers most closely related to the project; please also refer to the investigators' home pages for further work, much of it connected:

The following are not yet publically available; please email Paul Kelly if you would like a preprint: