Analysis of memory referencing behavior for design of local memories

Memory-referencing behavior is analyzed by the study of traces for the purpose of developing local memory structures and management techniques. A trace-processing technique called flattening reduces the dependence of the results on the underlying compiler and architecture on which the trace was generated, and partitions each memory location into its constituent values. The referencing patterns of each value in the resulting trace is described using statistics such as interreference time, lifetime, etc. The referencing patterns of the entire trace are described by histograms showing the distributions for the statistics of the individual values. The results of this analysis indicate that the use of a program-controlled cache to efficiently reduce the traffic from the cache to main memory will improve productivity. By using program control, the future knowledge of the compiler can be imparted to the cache, allowing the rejection of dead values and early replacement of values with long interreference times