An early memory hierarchy evaluation simulator for multimedia applications

This paper presents XMSIM, an early memory hierarchy evaluation simulator for multimedia applications. The input is source code in C and a memory hierarchy description and the output is profiling information about memory operations during the execution of the source code. A memory hierarchy can be made of arbitrary levels of cache and main memory while multiple hierarchies can be modeled in parallel. Any subset of the source code’s variables can be mapped to the simulated memory units to any location of choice and the contents of any memory level are available at any execution step. Specialized routines can be added to verify correctness of optimizations made in the source code in respect to memory usage. The simulator is extensible in that additional memory characteristics can be modeled and more information on the effect of software-hardware interaction can be extended. A demonstration is presented of how the tool can be used to optimize a multimedia application.