PDATS II: improved compression of address traces

Abstract

The tremendous storage space required for a useful data base of memory reference traces has prompted a search for trace compaction techniques. PDATS is the standard trace format used in the NMSU TraceBase, a widely used archive of memory and instruction traces. The PDATS family of trace compression techniques achieves trace coding densities of about six references per byte with no loss of reference type or address information by using differential run-length encoding. This paper proposes an improvement on the PDATS scheme that doubles the typical compression ratio without losing information.