Address reference generation in a memory hierarchy simulator environment
A.J. Niessen, Harry A. G. Wijshoff · 1995
Application driven address reference generation is a popular and frequently used technique for the simulation of architectures. These references can be produced by means of the insertion of instrumentation statements in the source code. However, this requires a major rewriting of the application source code under study. To alleviate this disadvantage, this report describes the use of C++ classes and operator overloading minimizing the amount of application code that is affected. The following frequently used sparse matrix application codes are currently used in conjunction with this simulator: sparse matrix (SpM) LUdecomposition, (SpM x SpM) multiplication, with (SpM x V) sparse matrix vector multiply as a special case, and triangular solve. This report demonstrates the use of this simulator for one of these applications. 1 Introduction A hierarchical memory system consists of several storage levels [7, 8, 13, 16, 17]. Each of these levels is faster and smaller than the level below....