Objective:
To write a program that will simulate a program execution to evaluate a computer system’s cache performance based on hit ratio and effective access time. Introduction:
Improving run-time performance is the main purpose behind the use of cache memory. A cache hit occurs when a word that is being referenced is found in the cache and the word is immediately forwarded to the CPU.
A cache miss occurs when the referenced word is not found in the cache and the entire block that contains the referenced word is read into the cache from main memory.
Hit ratio and effective access time are two measures that are used to characterize the performance of a cache memory.
The time per hit is the cache access time and the time per miss corresponds to the time to transfer a block of memory to the cache.
In addition to the sequence of memory locations a program accesses during execution, another factor that determines the performance of cache memory is how memory addresses are mapped to cache memory addresses.
Three schemes that have been developed for this purpose are: direct-mapped, set-associative mapped, and fully associative mapped.
For this project, you will write a program that will calculate the hit ratio and effective access time for a given program using the direct-mapped cache memory mapping scheme.
A program is defined by the sequence of memory locations it accesses. Description:
Input:
Your program should give the user the choice to configure the system, run a simulation using an input file, or quit.
To configure the system, the program should prompt the user for memory and cache configuration parameters:·
Block/Cache line size (# of words)·
Cache memory size (# of cache lines)·
Cache access time (nsec)·
Memory access time (nsec)
Given the above configuration, the program should then allow the user to run a simulation by first prompting the user for the filename representing a program.