How to fit program footprint curves

Abstract

A footprint is the volume of data accessed in a time window. A complete characterization requires summarizing all footprints in all execution windows. A concise summary is the footprint curve, which gives the average footprint in windows of different lengths. The footprint curve contains information from all footprints. It can be measured in time O(n) for a trace of length n, which is fast enough for most benchmarks. In this paper, we outline a study on footprint curves. We propose four curve fitting methods based on the real data observed in SPEC benchmark programs.