Patent ID: 7653790

Claim:
A computer system, comprising: a home cluster including a first plurality of processors and a home cache coherence controller, the first plurality of processors and the home cache coherence controller interconnected in a point-to-point architecture; a request cluster including a second plurality of processors and a request cache coherence controller, the second plurality of processors and the request cache coherence controller interconnected in a point-to-point architecture, the request cache coherence controller configured to receive a cache access request from a request processor and forward the request to the home cache coherence controller; wherein the home cache coherence controller is configured to send a probe to N remote cache coherence controllers in N remote clusters upon receiving the cache access request from the request cache coherence controller, wherein the probe includes a data value corresponding to N for the request cache coherence controller to determine the number of probe responses corresponding to the cache access request to be transmitted directly from a plurality of remote cache coherence controllers to the request cache coherence controller, wherein the home cache coherence controller extracts the value of N included in the probe received from the home cache coherence controller and signals the request processor after receiving responses from local nodes and the expected number of responses from remote cache coherence controllers.