Accurate Low-Cost Methods for Performance Evaluation of Cache Memory Systems

Trace-driven simulation is a simple way of evaluating cache memory systems with varying hardware parameters. But to evaluate realistic workloads, simulating even a few million addresses is not adequate and such large scale simulation is impractical from the consideration of space and time requirements. In this work, new methods of simulation based on statistical techniques are proposed for decreasing the need for large trace measurements and for predicting true program behavior. In our method, sampling techniques are applied while collecting the address trace from a workload. This drastically reduces the space and time needed to collect the trace. New simulation techniques are developed to use the sampled data not only to predict the mean miss rate of the cache, but also to provide an empirical estimate of its actual distribution. A model is proposed to statistically project the results to different context-switch intervals from only one simulation of a small number of samples of a fixed size. A new concept of primed cache is introduced to simulate large caches by the sampling-based method. Finally, a cache model is developed to study the performance of different split caches.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Laha, Subhasis

• Engineering, Electronics and Electrical
• Computer Science

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8815375

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/69385