Stanford DASH was a cache coherent

multiprocessor Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...

developed in the late 1980s by a group led by Anoop Gupta,

John L. Hennessy John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as ...

Mark Horowitz Mark A. Horowitz is the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and holds a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. He is a co-founder of Rambus Inc., now a techno ...

, and Monica S. Lam at Stanford University. It was based on adding a pair of directory boards designed at Stanford to up to 16

SGI IRIS 4D The SGI IRIS series of terminals and workstations from Silicon Graphics was produced in the 1980s and 1990s. IRIS is an acronym for Integrated Raster Imaging System. Overview 68000 The early systems up to IRIS 3000 use the Motorola 68000 series ...

Power Series machines and then cabling the systems in a mesh topology using a Stanford-modified version of the Torus Routing Chip. The boards designed at Stanford implemented a directory-based

cache coherence In computer architecture, cache coherence is the uniformity of shared resource data that ends up stored in multiple local caches. When clients in a system maintain caches of a common memory resource, problems may arise with incoherent data, whi ...

protocol allowing Stanford DASH to support

distributed shared memory In computer science, distributed shared memory (DSM) is a form of memory architecture where physically separated memories can be addressed as a single shared address space. The term "shared" does not mean that there is a single centralized memo ...

for up to 64 processors. Stanford DASH was also notable for both supporting and helping to formalize weak memory

consistency model In computer science, a consistency model specifies a contract between the programmer and a system, wherein the system guarantees that if the programmer follows the rules for operations on memory, memory will be consistent and the results of rea ...

s, including release consistency. Because Stanford DASH was the first operational machine to include scalable cache coherence, 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 and several computer science books, has been simulated by the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

, and is used as a case study in contemporary computer science classes.Meng Zhang, Duke University (2010
"The Stanford Dash Multiprocessor"
Retrieved on 3 November 2015.

References

{{Reflist Parallel computing Cluster computing Computers