Exercise

Explore how to measure the size and access cost of Translation Lookaside Buffers through a practical exercise. Understand timing methods to detect TLB hits and misses, analyze cache hierarchies, and learn techniques to ensure accurate performance measurements.

We'll cover the following...

- Questions

In this exercise, you are to measure the size and cost of accessing a TLB. The idea is based on work by Saavedra-Barrera“CPU Performance Evaluation and Execution Time Prediction Using Narrow Spectrum Benchmarking” by Rafael H. Saavedra-Barrera. EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley. Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-92-684, February 1992… A great dissertation about how to predict execution time of applications by breaking them down into constituent pieces and knowing the cost of each piece. Probably the most interesting part that comes out of this work is the tool to measure details of the cache hierarchy (described in Chapter 5). Make sure to check out the wonderful diagrams therein., who developed a simple but beautiful method to measure numerous aspects of cache hierarchies, all with a very simple user-level program. Read his work for more details.

The basic idea is to access some number of pages within a large data structure (e.g., an array) and to time those accesses. For example, let’s say the ...