Section: Software and Platforms

ATC

Participant : Pierre Michaud.

Address trace compression

Status: registered with APP number IDDN.FR.001.160031.000.S.P.2009.000.10800, available under GNU LGPL License.

Trace-driven simulation is an important tool in the computer architect's toolbox. However, one drawback of trace-driven simulation is the large amount of storage that may be necessary to store traces. Trace compression techniques are useful for decreasing the storage space requirement. But general-purpose compression techniques are generally not optimal for compressing traces because they do not take advantage of certain characteristics of traces. By specializing the compression method and taking advantages of known trace characterics, it is possible to obtain a better tradeoff between the compression ratio, the memory consumption and the compression and decompression speed.

ATC is a utility and a C library for compressing/decompressing address traces. It implements a new lossless transformation, Bytesort, that exploits spatial locality in address traces. ATC leverages existing general-purpose compressors such as gzip and bzip2. ATC also provides a lossy compression mode that yields higher compression ratios while preserving certain important characteristics of the original trace.

Visit http://www.irisa.fr/alf/atc or contact Pierre Michaud.