Cache performance of vector processors

Abstract

An instruction-level simulator for IBM 3090 with VF (vector facility) has been developed for studying the performance of vector processors and their memory hierarchies. Initial use of the simulator is to understand the program locality of real vectorized applications. Observation on several large scientific applications indicates that the program locality of vector execution can be significantly different from that of the scalar execution of the same application. Although these large applications generally do not exhibit a locality as strong as that of the conventional mainframe applications, their cache hit ratios are high enough to take advantage of a cache. The cache performance of these applications with respect to various cache parameters is also presented.