Cache simulator based on GPU acceleration

Cache technology plays a fundamental role in modern computer systems as it serves the purpose of matching the speed gap between processor and memory. Trace-driven simulator has been widely adopted in the process of design and evaluation of cache architectures. However, as the cache design moves to more complicated architectures, size of the trace is becoming larger and larger. Traditional simulation methods, which can only execute simulation operations in sequence, are no longer practical due to their long simulation cycles. In this paper, we explore both set-parallelism and search-parallelism in cache simulation process, and map our parallel algorithm to GPU-CPU platform. And we propose a trace-driven cache simulator on GPU using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Our experimental result shows that the new algorithm gains 2.5x performance improvement compared to traditional CPU-based serial algorithm.