Approximate analysis of access contention for multiprocessor systems with common bus arbiters

In multiprocessor systems with a common bus arbiter, contention for access to the common bus and shared memory is a major cause of performance degradation. The first-order moment match approximation is an effective technique of performance evaluation in such systems. Comparison with simulation results demonstrates that the first-order moment match technique gives good accuracy. The performance of completely coupled multiprocessor systems is compared with that of bus-arbitrated multiprocessor systems in order to determine the applications for which the latter is best suited.