Multiple bus architecture:

One solution to the bandwidth restriction of a single bus is to simply add extra buses. Consider the architecture indicated in given figure that contains N processors, P1 P2 PN, each containing its own private cache, and all linked to a shared memory by B buses BB, B1, B2. The shared memory consists of M interleaved banks M1 M2,MM to permit simultaneous memory requests concurrent access to the shared memory. It ignores the loss in performance that happen if those accesses have to be serialized, which is the case when there is only 1 memory bank. Each processor is linked to every bus and so is each memory bank. When a processor requires accessing a specific bank, it has B buses from which to select. Therefore each processor- memory pair is linked by various redundant paths, which implies that the failure of 1 or more paths can, principally, be tolerated at the cost of some degradation in system performance.

In a multiple bus system many processors may try to access the shared memory simultaneously. To deal with this problem, a policy might be implemented that allocates the available buses to the processors making requests to memory. In particular case, the policy might deal with the case when the number of processors exceeds from the B. For performance point of view this allocation has to be performed by hardware arbiters which, as we will see, add significantly to the difficulty of the multiple bus interconnection networks.

PCout, R=B, MARin, Read, IncPC

• WFMC
• MDRoutB, R=B, IRin
• R4out, R5outB, SelectA, Add, R6in, End.