University of North Texas Cache Configurations Paper

The goal for this is to evaluate the impact of different cache configurations on the execution times of applications. You will run several benchmark traces provided for you on (arch.cse.unt.edu). You should have an account on this machine and should be able to access as arch.cse.unt.edu

These files are placed in the following directory /opt/arch/dinero_traces/

There are 4 benchmarks blackscholes.out, myocyte.out, particlefilter.out, streamcluster.out

You specify these file names along the path name as the input to Dinero IV.

You will evaluate L1 and L2 misses when adjusting the cache configurations of L2 and L1. Both L1 and L2 use write back and use LRU replacement algorithm.

First, you should evaluate just L1 cache with the following configurations (here no L2) 

Size of L1-I and L1-D is fixed to 32KB

Block sizes should be configured as 32 Bytes and 64 Bytes.

Associativities as 2-way and 8-way 

Then, add L2 Cache of size 256KB, repeat above tests. The block sizes and associativity should match the L1’s

OR Follow the table for all the combinations you should be testing:

  

L1 size 

Associativity

Block size

 

32

2

32

 

32

8

32

 

32

2

64

 

32

8

64

 

L1 & L2 size

Associativity

Block size

 

32   & 256

2

32

 

32 & 256

8

32

 

32 & 256

2

64

 

32 & 256

8

64

Cycles on Hit and Miss

The table below indicates the number of processor clocks for a hit in each of the L-2 cache configurations. L1 hit takes 1 cycle. If there is no L2 cache, L1 miss penalty is 40 cycles. L-2 miss penalty is also 40 cycles.

  

Size   Associative

2-way

8-way

 

256   Kbyte

4

6

Use the cache simulator to get the L1 & L2 miss rates and compute the CPI for each benchmark-cache configuration combination (CPI equation can be found in class notes).Use the cycle count for hits and misses of the L2 & L1 and determine which cache configuration will give the best performance (lowest CPI) for each benchmark. 

You will be required to make a shells script in order to easily run all possible configurations, submit this shell script with your results. 

Dinero IV:

The DineroIV simulator is readily available on arch server. You need to login to the machine using your EUID and password provided. If you wish to run the simulator on your on machine, you can download the source code from: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/DineroIV/.(Note: I do not believe that dinero will compile out of the box for any form of Windows.It is fairly easy to get running on Mac OS-X and various flavors of Linux.)There is a short documentation page for Dinero on Wikipedia.org at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinero_(cache_simulator) .