A Generic Tool Supporting Cache Design and Optimisation on Shared Memory Systems

Abstract

For multi-core architectures, improving the cache performance is crucial for the overall system performance. In contrast to the common approach to design caches with the best trade-off between performance and costs, this work favours an application specific cache design. Therefore, an analysis tool capable of exhibiting the reason of cache misses has been developed. The results of the analysis can be used by system developers to improve cache architectures or can help programmers to improve the data locality behaviour of their programs. The SPLASH-2 benchmark suite is used to demonstrate the abilities of the analysis model.