Trace reduction for virtual memory simulations
SIGMETRICS '99 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Flexible reference trace reduction for VM simulations
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS)
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LRU buffer management is a policy under which an element buffer of size k always stores the k most recently used elements. Many variants of the policy are widely used in memory systems (e.g., virtual memory subsystems). We study a simple algorithmic problem (called the trace reduction problem): given a sequence of references to elements (a reference trace), compute the shortest sequence with identical LRU behavior for buffers of at least a certain size. Despite the straightforward statement of the problem, its solution is non-trivial. We offer an algorithm and discuss its practical applications. These are mostly in the area of trace-driven program simulation: for quite realistic buffer sizes, reference traces from real programs can be reduced by a factor of up to several orders of magnitude. This compares favorably with all previous trace reduction techniques in the literature.