Remembrance of Things Past: Locality and Memory in BDDs

Binary Decision Diagrams BDDs are e cient at manipulating large sets in a compact manner. BDDs, however, are inefcient at utilizing the memory hierarchy of the computer. Recent work addresses this problem by manipulating the BDDs in breath- rst manner BFS. BFS processing is quite successful at reducing the number of page faults when the BDDs do not t in the available physical memory. When paging does not take place, it is much less clear which paradigm leads to the better performance. In this paper, we perform a detailed analysis of BFS and DFS packages using simulation and direct performance monitoring of the memory hierarchy. We show that there is very little di erence in TLB and cache miss rates for DFS and BFS paradigms. We also show that di erences in execution time between carefully tuned BFS and DFS implementations are primarily a function of the lossless computed table used in BFS implementations, and not a function of memory locality. Furthermore, we present implementatio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Srilatha Manne, Dirk Grunwald, Fabio Somenzi
• Keywords: Available Physical Memory, BFS Paradigms, Computer Architecture, DAC 1997, Memory Hierarchy