Cache Simulation

A cache simulator and a number of address traces are available to help you in your assignment. You will need to simulate the behaviour of a number of cache configurations using the dinero simulator in order to optimize your choice of design parameters. You have at your disposal a set of three address traces from TEX, spice and gcc located in:-

   ~cs3/comparch/Coursework/traces/benchmarks

There are three trace files, one for each of the programs mentioned above. These are compressed ASCII text files in the dinero input format, and are called:-

   cc1.din.Z
   spice.din.Z
   tex.din.Z

The dinero simulator expects to read a .din trace file from the standard input, so one can simulate using a compressed trace file by using zcat and then piping the resulting output into dinero, thus:-

   zcat cc1.din.Z | dinero -b16 -i8k -b8k

Note that dinero requires at least the -b, -i and -d command-line parameters. Please refer to the man page on dinero before attempting to use it for any real simulations.

Remember, you are only concerned with the design of the data cache; instruction references should be ignored.