Cache characterization surfaces and predicting workload miss rates

Abstract

In this paper, we use locality surfaces to predict cache miss rates. To do this, we introduce two new surfaces. The miss surface characterizes how a trace is filtered by a particular cache in terms of locality. A cache characterization surface helps us examine caches in terms of what stride/delay relationships are likely to cause misses in the cache. The cache characterization surface is independent of any workload. We use these surfaces to quantitatively predict cache miss rates with some degree of accuracy.