La nueva tendencia para aumentar el rendimiento de los futuroscomputadores son los multiprocesadores en un solo chip (CMPs). Seespera que en un futuro cercano salgan al mercado CMPs con decenas deprocesadores. Hoy en d�a, la mejor manera de mantener la coherencia decache en estos sistemas es mediante los protocolos basados endirectorio. Sin embargo, estos protocolos tienen dos grandesproblemas: una gran sobrecarga de memoria y una alta latencia de losfallos de cache.Esta tesis se ha centrado en estos problemas claves para la eficienciay escalabilidad del CMP. En primer lugar, se ha presentado unaorganizaci�n de directorios escalable. En segundo lugar, se hanpropuesto los protocolos de coherencia directa, que evitan laindirecci�n al nodo home y, por tanto, reducen el tiempo de ejecuci�nde las aplicaciones. Por �ltimo, se ha desarrollado una pol�tica demapeo para caches compartidas pero f�sicamente distribuidas, quereduce la latencia de acceso y garantiza una distribuci�n uniforme delos datos con el fin de reducir su tasa de fallos. Esto se traducefinalmente en un menor tiempo de ejecuci�n para las aplicaciones. / Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) constitute the new trend for increasingthe performance of future computers. In the near future, chips withtens of cores will become more popular. Nowadays, directory-basedprotocols constitute the best alternative to keep cache coherence inlarge-scale systems. Nevertheless, directory-based protocols have twoimportant issues that prevent them from achieving better scalability:the directory memory overhead and the long cache miss latencies.This thesis focuses on these key issues. The first proposal is ascalable distributed directory organization that copes with the memoryoverhead of directory-based protocols. The second proposal presentsthe direct coherence protocols, which are aimed at avoiding theindirection problem of traditional directory-based protocols and,therefore, they improve applications' performance. Finally, a novelmapping policy for distributed caches is presented. This policyreduces the long access latency while lessening the number of off-chipaccesses, leading to improvements in applications' execution time.

Cache coherence protocols based on tokens can provide low latency without relying on non-scalable interconnects thanks to the use of efficient requests that are unordered. However, when these unordered requests contend for the same memory block, they may cause protocols races. To resolve the races and ensure the completion of all the cache misses, token protocols use a starvation prevention mechanism that is inefficient and non-scalable in terms of required storage structures and generated traffic. Besides, token protocols use non-silent invalidations which increase the latency of write misses proportionally to the system size. All these problems make token protocols non-scalable. To overcome the main problems of token protocols and increase their scalability, we propose a new starvation prevention mechanism named Priority Requests. This mechanism resolves contention by an efficient, elegant, and flexible method based on ordered requests. Furthermore, thanks to Priority Requests, efficient techniques can be applied to limit the storage requirements of the starvation prevention mechanism, to reduce the total traffic generated for managing protocol races, and to reduce the latency of write misses. Thus, the main problems of token protocols can be solved, which, in turn, contributes to wide their efficiency and scalability. / Cuesta Sáez, BA. (2009). Efficient techniques to provide scalability for token-based cache coherence protocols [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/6024