Patent ID: 7360033

Claim:
An apparatus to manage a virtual cache hierarchy with a peer agent and a home agent comprising: a requesting node to request cached data from the peer agent and the home agent, the requesting node being a member of a local cluster of peer nodes, the cluster including at least the peer agent and the home agent; the peer agent being coupled to communicate with a first plurality of nodes, each node in the first plurality of nodes having at least a cache memory, the peer agent having a control circuit and memory coupled to communicate with the first plurality of nodes to represent a second plurality of nodes, wherein the first plurality of nodes interact with the peer agent using the predetermined cache coherency protocol; and the home agent being coupled to communicate with the first plurality of nodes to represent at least one remote node, wherein each of the first plurality of nodes operates as a home node, an address of a cache line of the cache memory being used to designate the home node, the home agent selectively storing data corresponding to a predetermined range in non-cache memory such that the home node for requested data having an address within the respective predetermined range provides a copy of the requested data from non-cache memory if a valid, cached copy of the requested data is not available.