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CHAPTER
7 Scalable Multiprocessors
transactions. The support of a global physical address space brings us full circle to
designs that are close in spirit to the small-scale shared memory machines studied in
the previous chapter. However, automatic replication of shared data through coher-
ent caches in a scalable fashion is considerably more involved than in the bus-based
setting, and we devote Chapters 8 and 9 to that topic.
7.1 SCALABILITY
What does it mean for a design to "scale"? Almost all computers allow the capability
of the system to be increased in some form, for example by adding memory, I/O
cards,
disks, or upgraded processor(s) ...