Chameleon: A Framework for Observing, Understanding, and Imitating the Memory Behavior of Applications

In this work, we present an integrated solution to three classic problems in the field of performance analysis: memory modeling, synthetic address trace generation, and the creation of synthetic benchmark proxies for applications. First, we describe an intuitive characterization of memory access locality that can accurately predict an application’s hit rates on arbitrary cache configurations, even when block sizes and cache depths change. We then describe the implementation of a memory tracer that can extract this characterization from applications and a software tool that can generate synthetic address traces to match. Lastly, we describe Chameleon, a fully tunable synthetic benchmark whose memory behavior can be dictated by the traces described above. We show that applications and their Chameleon counterparts display highly similar memory behavior as measured by simulated and observed cache hit rates.