HASE Dinero is a computer cache architecture simulation tool. It is composed of two main parts:
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The Hierarchical computer Architecture design and Simulation Environment (HASE) |
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Dinero, a cache simulator |
HASE is a project still in development at Edinburgh University. The current status of the project can be found at the HASE website. HASE has existed since 1992 and was designed to provide an easy to use tool for computer architects, allowing various architectural designs to be quickly implemented and tested.
HASE uses a C++ based event-driven simulation language called HASE++ which provides a powerful simulation environment for implementing computer architecture.
The main benefit of using HASE as a simulation environment is that it allows the architectural design to be animated in the HASE design window. This is a very powerful feature that allows both the operation of the architecture to be quickly understood and also provides a quick debugging method.
Dinero is a command-line based cache simulator written for the UNIX operating system. It is a trace-driven simulator, which means that it generates simulation results based on a large input trace file.
A trace file consists of about one million memory references that are captured during the course of an application's execution. Each trace file reference contains both a hexadecimal memory address and the access type of the reference (which is one of: data read, data write or instruction fetch). Dinero allows most of the basic cache architecture parameters to be varied for a simulation, and also allows two advanced architecture techniques to be experimented with: sub-block placement and prefetching.
HASE Dinero was developed in 1999 as a fourth year computer science project at Edinburgh University. It is basically an implementation of Dinero in HASE that was created to address the difficulty of using the original Dinero and also to provide a way of teaching the fundamentals of cache operation and architecture via an animation of the HASE display window.
