Automatic measurement of memory hierarchy parameters

On modern computers, the running time of many applica-tions is dominated by the cost of memory operations. To optimize such applications for a given platform, it is neces-sary to have a detailed knowledge of the memory hierarchy parameters of that platform. In practice, this information is usually poorly documented if at all. Moreover, there is growing interest in self-tuning, autonomic software systems that can optimize themselves for different platforms, and these systems must determine memory hierarchy parame-ters automatically without human intervention. One solution is to use micro-benchmarks to determine the parameters of the memory hierarchy. In this paper, we argue that existing micro-benchmarks are inadequate, and present novel micro-benchmarks for determining the para-meters of all levels of the memory hierarchy, including reg-isters, all caches levels and the translation look-aside buffer. We have implemented these micro-benchmarks into an in-tegrated tool that can be ported with little effort to new platforms. We present experimental results that show that this tool successfully determines memory hierarchy parame-ters on many current platforms, and compare its accuracy with that of existing tools. 1