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Performance Evaluation Laboratory

LOCALITY SURFACES

The locality surface is a unique, unified way to look at the temporal and spatial locality of a stream of numbers. We primarily use the locality surface to investigate the locality of the memory reference requests between a processor and its L1 cache.

CURRENT TOPICS

  • Create a parallel version of the locality surface and quantify how effective it is at improving the speed of computation.
  • Describe our locality function mathematically.
  • Use the locality surfaces to characterize a number of workloads. We currently have locality surfaces for all of the SPEC CINT2000 suite and most of the SPEC CFP 2000 suite under Linux, Windows NT, and Windows 2000

PAPERS and PUBLICATIONS

The full references and text of the following papers can be found here.
  • Dissertation Proposal: Cache Characterization and Performance Studies Using Locality Surfaces, 2003. This describes the goals of the current projects using the locality surface.
  • Evaluating Synthetic Trace Models Using Locality Surfaces, Nov. 2002
  • Thesis: Using Locality to Predict Cache Performance, 2001.
  • Cache Characterization Surfaces and Predicting Workload Miss Rates, Dec. 2001.
  • Using Locality Surfaces to Characterize the SPECINT 2000 Benchmark Suite, 2001.

CONTACT INFORMATION

For more information on locality surfaces, or for a copy of the locality program, please contact Elizabeth Sorenson (leb {at} byu {dot} edu).

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