This talk presents an equation to model how memory size affects page faults. The equation is derived with the help of a conjectured invariant on the interaction between reference behavior and replacement policy, and it is validated in experiments with real applications and systems. The equation can be used for energy conservation and capacity planning, characterizing the memory requirement of software and managing memory allocation, modeling of processor cache misses and database buffer management.

Biography: Y.C. Tay received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Singapore and Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. He has a joint appointment with the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tayyc). His main research interest is performance modeling (transaction processing, multimedia load-sharing, wireless access, parallel rendering and page replacement).