@TechReport{	  it:2005-013,
  author	= {H{\aa}kan Zeffer and Zoran Radovic and Erik Hagersten},
  title		= {Flexibility Implies Performance},
  institution	= {Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University},
  department	= {Division of Computer Systems},
  year		= {2005},
  number	= {2005-013},
  month		= apr,
  abstract	= {No single coherence strategy suits all applications well.
		  Many promising adaptive protocols and coherence predictors,
		  capable of dynamically modifying the coherence strategy,
		  have been suggested over the years.
		  
		  While most dynamic detection schemes rely on plentiful of
		  dedicated hardware, the customization technique suggested
		  in this paper requires no extra hardware support for its
		  per-application coherence strategy. Instead, each
		  application is profiled using a low-overhead profiling
		  tool. The appropriate coherence flag setting, suggested by
		  the profiling, is specified when the application is
		  launched.
		  
		  We have compared the performance of a hardware DSM (Sun
		  WildFire) to a software DSM built with identical
		  interconnect hardware and coherence strategy. With no
		  support for flexibility, the software DSM runs on average
		  45 percent slower than the hardware DSM on the 12 studied
		  applications, while the flexibility can get the software
		  DSM within 11 percent. Our all-software system outperforms
		  the hardware DSM on four applications.}
}