Footprints in the cache

Abstract

This paper develops an analytical model for cache-reload transients and compares the model to observations based on several address traces. The cache-reload transient is the set of cache misses that occur when a process is reinitiated after being suspended temporarily. For example, an interrupt program that runs periodically experiences a reload transient at each initiation. The reload transient depends on the cache size and on the sizes of the footprints in the cache of the competing programs, where a program footprint is defined to be the set of lines in the cache in active use by the program. The model shows that the size of the transient is related to the normal distribution function. A simulation based on program-address traces shows excellent agreement between the model and the observations.

A new memory monitoring scheme for memory-aware scheduling and partitioning

“…Thiébaut and Stone [19] modeled the amount of additional misses caused by context switches for set-associative caches. Agarwal, Horowitz and Hennessy [1] also included the effect of conflicts between processes in their analytical cache model and showed that inter-process conflicts are noticeable for a mid-range of cache sizes that are large enough to have a considerable number of conflicts but not large enough to hold all the working sets.…”

Transactional memory

“…The union of the read-set and the write-set of a transaction is sometimes called the footprint [100] of the transaction, i.e., the set of data items that have be accessed within the transaction.…”

“…While many studies at that time argued that most transactions were small (short) and/or occurred infrequently, Ananian et al argued that a transactional memory system "should support transactions of arbitrary size and duration" [4]. In other words, the system shall be able to handle transactions with footprints, i.e., the set of memory locations accessed [100], almost as large as the size of the virtual memory of the system. Further, a transaction can also execute for an arbitrary long time.…”

Exact analysis of the cache behavior of nested loops

“…Prior research [1,57] has investigated various analytic cache models by extracting parameters from the reference trace. Simulation techniques, such as cache profiling [43,39], can provide insight on potential program transformations by classifying misses according the cause of the cache miss.…”