Experiencing compression of computer address traces using wavelets

We present in this paper very simple compression experiments using wavelets of computer address traces which are heavily used in Computer Architecture simulation. Trace driven simulation is facing a major obstacle with the sizes of traces used during simulation. These sizes are requiring an increasing amount of storage to be stored and an increasing amount of simulation time to be consumed. We report in this paper some preliminary experiments of using the wavelet theory as a tool to reduce this size. Because of the well established locality nature of computation, a program profile exhibits patterns that we expected to meet the specifications of wavelet theory to be applied with interest. We conducted several experiments on a standard suite of benchmarks used for trace-driven simulations using several filters and thresholding policies. A part from excessive computation time requirements, this approach suffers from unstable behavior with performance varying from poor to excellent.