193 research outputs found
Warping Cache Simulation of Polyhedral Programs
Techniques to evaluate a program’s cache performance fall
into two camps: 1. Traditional trace-based cache simulators
precisely account for sophisticated real-world cache models
and support arbitrary workloads, but their runtime is proportional to the number of memory accesses performed by
the program under analysis. 2. Relying on implicit workload
characterizations such as the polyhedral model, analytical approaches often achieve problem-size-independent runtimes,
but so far have been limited to idealized cache models.
We introduce a hybrid approach, warping cache simulation, that aims to achieve applicability to real-world cache
models and problem-size-independent runtimes. As prior
analytical approaches, we focus on programs in the polyhedral model, which allows to reason about the sequence
of memory accesses analytically. Combining this analytical
reasoning with information about the cache behavior obtained from explicit cache simulation allows us to soundly
fast-forward the simulation. By this process of warping, we
accelerate the simulation so that its cost is often independent
of the number of memory accesses
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