Automatic measurement of memory hierarchy parameters
Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on …, 2005•dl.acm.org
The running time of many applications is dominated by the cost of memory operations. To
optimize such applications for a given platform, it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge
of the memory hierarchy parameters of that platform. In practice, this information is poorly
documented if at all. Moreover, there is growing interest in self-tuning, autonomic software
systems that can optimize themselves for different platforms; these systems must determine
memory hierarchy parameters automatically without human intervention. One solution is to …
optimize such applications for a given platform, it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge
of the memory hierarchy parameters of that platform. In practice, this information is poorly
documented if at all. Moreover, there is growing interest in self-tuning, autonomic software
systems that can optimize themselves for different platforms; these systems must determine
memory hierarchy parameters automatically without human intervention. One solution is to …
The running time of many applications is dominated by the cost of memory operations. To optimize such applications for a given platform, it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge of the memory hierarchy parameters of that platform. In practice, this information is poorly documented if at all. Moreover, there is growing interest in self-tuning, autonomic software systems that can optimize themselves for different platforms; these systems must determine memory hierarchy parameters automatically without human intervention.One solution is to use micro-benchmarks to determine the parameters of the memory hierarchy. In this paper, we argue that existing micro-benchmarks are inadequate, and present novel micro-benchmarks for determining parameters of all levels of the memory hierarchy, including registers, all data caches and the translation look-aside buffer. We have implemented these micro-benchmarks in a tool called X-Ray that can be ported easily to new platforms. We present experimental results that show that X-Ray successfully determines memory hierarchy parameters on current platforms, and compare its accuracy with that of existing tools.

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