Cachesim: A Graphical Software Environment to Support the Teaching of Computer Systems with Cache Memories

We present an educational software package (Cachesim) used as a teaching tool to study and analyse computer with cache memory. Cachesim allows students to execute step-by-step a program, to observe the cache activity needed for a memory operation, to evaluate the system performance by varying the program and/or the cache parameters and, finally, to analyse the program behaviour by the memory references. The user interface is fully graphic: Architectural modules of the simulated computer are managed as graphical objects and the main actions on them can be made by mouse clicks. The environment is based on VGA card and can be used on both MS-DOS and Windows platforms. This paper describes the software package and the simulated computer features by examining a student's exercise.