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As systems and applications grow more complex, detailed computer architecture simulation takes an ever increasing amount of time. Longer simulation times result in slower design iterations which then force architects to use simpler models, such as spreadsheets, when they want to iterate quickly on a design. Simple models are not easy to work with though, as architects must rely on intuition to choose representative models, and the path from the simple models to a detailed hardware simulation is not always clear. In this work, we present a method of bridging the gap between simple and detailed simulation by monitoring simulation behavior online and automatically swapping out detailed models with simpler statistical approximations. We demonstrate the potential of our methodology by implementing it in the open-source simulator SVE-Cachesim to swap out the level one data cache (L1D) within a memory hierarchy. This proof of concept demonstrates that our technique can train simple models to match real program behavior in the L1D and can swap them in without destructive side-effects for the performance of downstream models. Our models introduce only 8% error in the overall cycle count, while being used for over 90% of the simulation and using models that require two to eight times less computation per cache access. 

The problem of efficiently feeding processing elements and finding ways to reduce data movement is pervasive in computing. Efficient modeling of both temporal and spatial locality of memory references is invaluable in identifying superfluous data movement in a given application. To this end, we present a new way to infer both spatial and temporal locality using reuse distance analysis. This is accomplished by performing reuse distance analysis at different data block granularities: specifically, 64B, 4KiB, and 2MiB sizes. This process of simultaneously observing reuse distance with multiple granularities is called multi-spectral reuse distance. This approach allows for a qualitative analysis of spatial locality, through observing the shifting of mass in an application's reuse signature at different granularities. Furthermore, the shift of mass is empirically measured by calculating the Earth Mover's Distance between reuse signatures of an application. From the characterization, it is possible to determine how spatially dense the memory references of an application are based on the degree to which the mass has shifted (or not shifted) and how close (or far) the Earth Mover's Distance is to zero as the data block granularity is increased. It is also possible to determine an appropriate page size from this information, and whether or not a given page is being fully utilized. From the applications profiled, it is observed that not all applications will benefit from having a larger page size. Additionally, larger data block granularities subsuming smaller ones suggest that larger pages will allow for more spatial locality exploitation, but examining the memory footprint will show whether those larger pages are fully utilized or not.