Amnesia is a simulator for the teaching of memory hierarchy of computational systems. It allows a behavior simulation of registers (in a processor), cache memories, the main memory and paged virtual memory.

Amnesia represents the hardware and software structures used in memory hierarchy, their functionality and the impact in the performance when this hierarchy is used. Different hierarchy memory settings can be established and compared during the simulation activities.

The simulator is in development since 2007, by undergraduate and graduate students at ICMC, Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences), in the University of São Paulo (USP), supervised by the professors Paulo Sérgio Lopes de Souza e Sarita Mazzini Bruschi.

Since 2013 we are investigating and incorporating Learning Objects’ (LO) and Open Educational Resources’ (OER) features to Amnesia and making its code more robust and reliable. The simulator then began to offer, besides the software tool, a tutorial for its use, a text with the taught content, files with different memory hierarchy architectures (different memory hierarchy settings), trace files for memory access, and activities and class plans to be developed by the professor in his/her class or in extra class activities by students. Such support material aims to help professors and students during the learning process.

Paulo Sérgio Lopes de Souza
Sarita Mazzini Bruschi
LaSDPC/SSC/ICMC/USP