Synthetic Traces for Trace-Driven Simulation of Cache Memories

Abstract

This paper presents two techniques for producing synthetic address traces that produce good emulations of the locality of reference of real programs. The first algorithm gen erates synthetic addresses by simulating a random walk in an infinite address-space with references governed by a hyperboli probability law. The second algorithm is a refinement of the fiist 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 we demonstrate that synthetic traces exhibit miss-ratios and lifetime functions that compare well with those of the real traces they mimic, both in fully-associative as well as set-associative memories. © 1992 IEEE