A study of program locality and lifetime functions

Abstract

A program model can be regarded as decomposible into two main parts. The macromodel captures the phase-transition behavior by specifying locality sets and their associated reference intervals (phases). The micromodel captures the reference patterns within phases. A semi-Markov model can be used at the macro level, while one of the simple early models (such as the random-reference or LRU stack) can be used at the micro level. This paper shows that, even in simplest form, this type of model is capable of reproducing known properties of empirical lifetime functions. A micromodel, alone without a macromodel, is incapable of doing so.