Stanford DASH explained

Stanford DASH was a cache coherent multiprocessor developed in the late 1980s by a group led by Anoop Gupta, John L. Hennessy, Mark Horowitz, and Monica S. Lam at Stanford University.^[1] It was based on adding a pair of directory boards designed at Stanford to up to 16 SGI IRIS 4D Power Series machines and then cabling the systems in a mesh topology using a Stanford-modified version of the Torus Routing Chip.^[2] The boards designed at Stanford implemented a directory-based cache coherence protocol^[3] allowing Stanford DASH to support distributed shared memory for up to 64 processors. Stanford DASH was also notable for both supporting and helping to formalize weak memory consistency models, including release consistency.^[4] Because Stanford DASH was the first operational machine to include scalable cache coherence,^[5] it influenced subsequent computer science research as well as the commercially available SGI Origin 2000. Stanford DASH is included in the 25th anniversary retrospective of selected papers from the International Symposium on Computer Architecture^[6] and several computer science books,^{[7] [8] [9] [10] [11]} has been simulated by the University of Edinburgh,^[12] and is used as a case study in contemporary computer science classes.^{[13] [14]}

Notes and References

1. The Stanford Dash Multiprocessor. Lenoski. Daniel. James. Laudon . Kourosh. Gharachorloo . Wolf-Dietrich. Weber . Anoop. Gupta . John. Hennessy . Mark. Horowitz . Monica S.. Lam. Computer. 25. 3. 1992. 63–79. 10.1109/2.121510. 9731523.
2. The torus routing chip. Dally. William J.. Charles L.. Seitz . Distributed Computing. 1. 4. 1986. 187–196. 10.1007/BF01660031. 10500442.
3. Lenoski . Daniel . Laudon . James. Gharachorloo . Kourosh. Gupta . Anoop. Hennessy. John . The directory-based cache coherence protocol for the DASH multiprocessor . Proceedings of the 17th Annual International symposium on Computer Architecture . ACM. 148–159 . 1990. 10.1145/325164.325132.
4. Gharachorloo . Kourosh . Lenoski . Daniel . Laudon . James. Gibbons . Phillip. Gupta. Anoop . Hennessy. John . Memory consistency and event ordering in scalable shared-memory multiprocessors . Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture. 15–26 . 1990. 10.1145/325096.325102.
5. Book: Hennessy. John. Patterson. David. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. registration. Third. 2003. 655. Morgan Kaufmann. 978-1-558-60596-1.
6. The DASH prototype: Implementation and Performance. 25 years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture (Selected Papers). Sohi. Gurindar. Lenoski. Daniel. James. Laudon . Truman. Joe . David. Nakahira . Luis. Stevens . John. Hennessy . Anoop. Gupta. 1998. 418–429.
7. Book: Suzuki. Norihisa. Shared Memory Multiprocessing. 1992. 391–406. The MIT Press. 978-0-262-19322-1.
8. Book: Loshin. David. High Performance Computing Demystified. 80, 91. 1994. Academic Press. 978-0-124-55825-0. registration.
9. Book: Parhami. Behrooz. Introduction to Parallel Processing: Algorithms and Architectures. 450–451. 1999. Springer. 978-0-306-45970-2.
10. Book: Hill. Mark. Norman Jouppi. Jouppi. Norman. Sohi. Gurindar. Readings in Computer Architecture. 2000. 583–599. Morgan Kaufmann. 978-1-55860-539-8.
11. Book: Dandamudi . Sivarama. Hierarchical Scheduling in Parallel and Cluster Systems. limited . 2003. Springer US. 21–22. 10.1007/978-1-4615-0133-6. Series in Computer Science. 978-1-4613-4938-9. 46434929.
12. Institute for Computing Systems Architecture, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh "Stanford DASH Architecture: Cluster Simulation Model", Retrieved on 3 November 2015.
13. Carl Olson and Mattan Erez, The University of Texas at Austin (2007) "The Stanford Dash Multiprocessor", Retrieved on 3 November 2015.
14. Meng Zhang, Duke University (2010) "The Stanford Dash Multiprocessor", Retrieved on 3 November 2015.