PARACACHE: Educational Simulator for Cache and Virtual Memory

With the increasing computational demand, efficiency and effectiveness of cache and virtual memory become an important area to be looked into. By utilising the correct caching method, an architecture would achieve maximum performance with minimum resources. To choose the appropriate configuration, the fundamental of cache and virtual memory must be understood by every engineer. Developed by the authors, this project aims to deliver a web-based simulator to visualize cache and virtual memory processes better. The simulator provides users with interactive tutorials and simulations to help them better comprehend the fundamental concepts of memory management. PARACACHE is implemented using HTML assisted by CSS in styling and JavaScript in logic. Bootstrap is incorporated to handle different size of screen across various web-platforms. The key goal of the web-based simulator is to summarise both the memory allocation efficiency along with its hardware implementation cost. This will enable the user to have a thorough analysis and comparison of various cache mapping schemes supported by interactive graphical method. In the paper, we compare PARACACHE to various existing systems and explore the salient features in detail.