Prototype Design Details

  
Figure 8: Geometry for prototype machine. Each station contains 4 processors.

The NUMAchine prototype (currently under construction) consists of a 64-processor system using two levels of rings, with the 4x4 geometry shown in Figure 8. The initial CPU boards will utilize 150 MHz MIPS R4400 processors, with 1 MB of L2 cache. The Network Cache on each station will contain at least 4 MB of memory.

• System Modules
  • Processor Module
  • Memory Module
  • Ring Interfaces
    • Local Ring Interface
    • Inter-Ring Interface
  • Network Cache
• Hardware/Software Interaction
  • Update of shared data
  • Software managed caching
  • In-cache zeroing/copying
• Performance Monitoring Hardware
  • Multipurpose Counters
  • Histogram Tables
  • Cache Coherency Histogram Table