Dinero IV Trace-Driven Uniprocessor Cache Simulator

by Jan Edler, formerly of NEC

and Mark D. Hill, Univ. of Wisconsin Computer Sciences

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/DineroIV


Dinero IV is a cache simulator for memory reference traces. It includes the following major changes over Dinero III.

Some deep-seated limitations:

The basic idea is to simulate a memory hierarchy consisting of various caches connected as one or more trees, with reference sources (the processors) at the leaves and a memory at each root. The various parameters of each cache can be set separately (architecture, policy, statistics). During initialization, the configuration to be simulated is built up, one cache at a time, starting with each memory as a special case. After initialization, each reference is fed to the appropriate top-level cache by a single simple function call. Lower levels of the hierarchy are handled automatically.

At some future time, Dinero IV may be extended to simulate multiprocessors. In the meantime, there is no support for consistency, so for practical purposes, the tree of caches will not be very branchy (the only time where multiple sources will feed into a cache is when separate instruction and data caches are used).

Dinero IV is copyrighted software, but freely available for non-commercial use. The terms are explained here. Full source and documentation in gzipped tar format can be downloaded by anonymous ftp from Wisconsin.

Dinero IV is built with Gnu autoconf, and has been tested with x86/Linux, Alpha/Linux, Alpha/OSF, SGI/IRIX-6, RS6000/AIX, x86/Solaris, and Sparc/Solaris.

Dinero IV was written by Jan Edler and Mark D. Hill:

    Dr. Jan Edler                    Prof. Mark D. Hill
    Address TBD                      Computer Sciences Dept.
    Address TBD                      Univ. of Wisconsin
    Address TBD                      Madison, WI 53706
    edler@computer.org               Email Address of Mark Hill
    edler@acm.org

Known Bugs