Locality-based online trace compression

Trace-driven simulation is one of the most important techniques used by computer architecture researchers to study the behavior of complex systems and to evaluate new microarchitecture enhancements. However, modern benchmarks, which largely resemble real-world applications, result in long and unmanageable traces. Compression techniques can be employed to reduce storage requirement of traces. Special trace compression schemes such as Mache and PDATS/PDI take advantage of spatial locality to compress memory reference addresses. In this paper, we propose the locality-based trace compression (LBTC) method, which employs both spatial locality and temporal locality of program memory references. It efficiently compresses not only the address but also other attributes associated with each memory reference. In addition, LBTC is designed to be simple and on-the-fly. If traces with addresses and other attributes are compressed by LBTC, the compression ratio is better by a factor of 2 over compression by PDI.