Software
Cache Analyzer
Author: Ivan Šimeček
Keywords
Processor architecture, cache hierarchy, software cache emulation, cache miss analyzer.
Abstract
Every modern CPU use a complex
memory hierarchy, which consists of levels of cache memories. It is
really
difficult to predict the behavior of this hierarchy for the given
program. The Cache Analyzer (shortly CA) simulates the behavior of
a real microprocessor’s cache and compute the number of cache misses
during a
computation. All measurements are done in the "off-line" mode; the CA
uses own virtual cache memory for the exact simulation. It also means
that
another CPU activity doesn’t influence the behavior of the CA. The
cache model we
consider corresponds to the structure of L1 - L3 caches on vast of
modern
memory architectures.
Overview of the CA in Proceedings of CTU WORKSHOP, 2005
What's new
March 29 2005 - version 1.02 of the CA is released.
March 21 2005 - version 1.01 of the CA is released.
March 14 2005 - version 1.0 of the CA is released.
March 9 2005 - version 0.99 of the CA is
released.
History
version 1.02 - some minor functions are added.
version 0.99 - the CA is corrected and its speed is slightly
improved.
version 0.9 - the CA is completely rewritten to be easy to use and more
pure.
version 0.5 - the first fully functional version of the CA.
Known bugs
- The CA can be use also for estimation of the TLB misses. Since TLB is usually implemented
as fully-associative, searching in the CA is very difficult and it slows down the computation.
- I have not verified the 64bit version of the CA.
(Possible) future works
- Put the CA onto SOURCEFORGE (almost done).
- Add a support for exclusive levels of caches.
- Speedup the execution (if it is possible).
Used in papers
Almost in all of my papers (expect these focused on SMP or GPGPU).
Download:
Cache Analyzer 1.02 Cache Analyzer
1.02
Cache Analyzer 1.01 Cache Analyzer
1.01
Cache Analyzer 1.00 Cache Analyzer
1.0
Cache Analyzer 0.99 Cache Analyzer
0.99
Cache Analyzer 0.50 Cache Analyzer 0.5
Example of using the CA Gemm SMP
Cache parameters definition files:
