Analysis of memory referencing behavior for design of local memories

Memory referencing behavior is analyzed via the study of traces for the purpose of developing new local memory structures and management techniques. A novel trace processing technique called flattening reduces the dependence of the results on the underlying compiler and architecture on which the trace was generated, and partitions each memory location into its constituent values. The referencing patterns of each value in the resulting trace is described via statistics such as interreference time, lifetime, etc. The referencing patterns of the entire trace are described via histograms showing the distributions of the statistics for the individual values. The results of this analysis indicate the use of a program controlled cache to efficiently reduce the traffic from the cache to main memory. By using program control, the future knowledge of the compiler can be imparted to the cache, allowing the rejection of dead values and early replacement of values with long interreference times.