cartesian product … stuff about computing mostly

In the steps of László Bélády

Update: I have truncated this article for now (20 December) as there was an error in my LRU software that made LRU look like a much better performer than it really was. I’ll update this with the correct data shortly….

 

In 1966 László Bélády published “A study of replacement algorithms for virtual storage computers”, one of the truly epoch making papers for operating system science – the first comprehensive examination of page replacement strategies for virtual memory computers.

These days all but the simplest embedded computing devices will use some sort of virtual memory system because it allows computing devices to (relatively) seamlessly load bits of computer programs in and out of memory as needed – the programs see a faked – virtual – address and so the chunks can be loaded in an out of whatever piece of memory is available without worrying about having to get the chunks into exactly the same place every time.

But in 1966 virtual memory was a new and essentially experimental technology and so Belady’s examination of the different strategies for deciding which chunk (page) of memory was kept or replaced when new pages were required to be loaded is the foundation stone of all the approaches that followed.

This last couple of weeks I have found myself walking in the steps of Bélády as I built software to examine the different performance characteristics of potential page replacement policies in a network-on-chip computer.

I have about 220GB of XML data which represents a record of the memory accesses of an 18 threaded video processing application – and using that data I can test computer system performance using various different policies.

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Adrian McMenamin

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