Synthetic traces for trace-driven simulation of cache memories

Two techniques for producing synthetic address traces that produce good emulations of the locality of reference of real programs are presented. The first algorithm generates synthetic addresses by simulating a random walk in an infinite address-space with references governed by a hyperbolic probability law. The second algorithm is a refinement of the first in which the address space has a given finite size. The basic model for the random walk has two parameters that correspond to the working set size and the locality of reference. By comparing synthetic traces with real traces of identical locality parameters, it is demonstrated that synthetic traces exhibit miss ratios and lifetime functions that compare well with those of the real traces they mimic, both in fully associative and in set-associative memories.<
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