STM: Cloning the spatial and temporal memory access behavior

Abstract

Computer architects need a deep understanding of clients' workload in order to design and tune the architecture. Unfortunately, many important clients will not share their software to computer architects due to the proprietary or confidential nature of their software. One technique to mitigate this problem is producing synthetic traces (clone) that replicate the behavior of the original workloads. Unfortunately, today there is no universal cloning technique that can capture arbitrary memory access behavior of applications. Existing technique captures only temporal, but not spatial, locality. In order to study memory hierarchy organization beyond caches, such as including prefetchers and translation lookaside buffer (TLB), capturing only temporal locality is insufficient. In this paper, we propose a new memory access behavior cloning technique that captures both temporal and spatial locality. We abbreviate our scheme as Spatio-Temporal Memory (STM) cloning. We propose a new profiling method and statistics that capture stride patterns and transition probabilities. We show how the new statistics enable accurate clone generation that allow clones to be used in place of the original benchmarks for studying the L1/L2/TLB miss rates as we vary the L1 cache, L1 prefetcher, L2 cache, TLB, and page size configurations.