A single-pass cache simulation methodology for two-level unified caches

Cache tuning is the process of determining the optimal cache configuration given an application´s requirements for reducing energy consumption and improving performance. As embedded systems trend towards unified second-level caches for improved performance, the need for fast cache tuning methodologies for multi-level cache hierarchies is becoming more critical. In this paper, we present U-SPaCS, a single-pass cache simulation methodology for design-time tuning of two-level cache hierarchies with a unified second-level cache. To afford fast simulation time, U-SPaCS maintains unique cache block addresses in a set of stacks, which enables simulation of all cache configurations for the level one instruction and data caches, and level two unified cache simultaneously in a single pass of an application´s time-ordered instruction and data access trace. Experiments show that U-SPaCS can accurately determine the miss rates for a configurable cache design space consisting of 2,187 cache configurations with a 41X speedup in average simulation time as compared to the most widely-used trace-driven cache simulation.