Cache Characterization and Performance Studies Using Locality Surfaces

Today's processors commonly use caches to help overcome the disparity between processor and main memory speeds. Due to the principle of locality, most of the processor's requests for data are satisfied by the fast cache memory, resulting in a signficant performance improvement. Methods for evaluating workloads and caches in terms of locality are valuable for cache design. In this dissertation, we present a locality surface which displays both temporal and spatial locality on one three-dimensional graph. We provide a solid, mathematical description of locality data and equations for visualization. We then use the locality surface to examine the locality of a variety of workloads from the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark suite. These surfaces contain a number of features that represent sequential runs, loops, temporal locality, striding, and other patterns from the input trace. The locality surface can also be used to evaluate methodologies that involve locality. For example, we evaluate six synthetic trace generation methods and find that none of them accurately reproduce an original trace's locality. We then combine a mathematical description of caches with our locality definition to create cache characterization surfaces. These new surfaces visually relate how references with varying degrees of locality function in a given cache. We examine how varying the cache size, line size, and associativity affect a cache's response to different types of locality. We formally prove that the locality surface can predict the miss rate in some types of caches. Our locality surface matches well with cache simulation results, particularly caches with large associativities. We can qualitatively choose prudent values for cache and line size. Further, the locality surface can predict the miss rate with 100% accuracy for some fully associative caches and with some error for set associative caches. One drawback to the locality surface is the time intensity of the stack-based algorithm. We provide a new parallel algorithm that reduces the computation time significantly. With this improvement, the locality surface becomes a viable and valuable tool for characterizing workloads and caches, predicting cache simulation results, and evaluating any procedure involving locality.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Grantor dc:publisher

Brigham Young University - Provo

Author dc:creator

• Sorenson, Elizabeth Schreiner

• locality surface
• locality
• cache characterization surface
• synthetic workloads
• cache performance
• Computer Sciences

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/603

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-1602