The goal of our work is to develop techniques that accurately and efficiently simulate the behavior of computer systems with cache memories. This thesis describes the design, analysis, and validation of three such methods of cache performance prediction. Execution-driven simulation is a technique that avoids the high overhead associated with instruction-level simulation while retaining most of the accuracy of that technique. We have extended the execution-driven paradigm to develop a time and space-efficient technique for address trace generation and cache simulation, as well as to provide estimates of overall execution time. The second method that we have developed is an analytical model for the prediction of cache miss ratios using single-process traces. Finally, a simple and efficient estimative simulation technique based on the analytical model and the execution-driven paradigm has been outlined. This approach is demonstrated in the simulation of cache-based multiprocessor systems in conjunction with the Rice Parallel Processing Testbed, which simulates concurrent algorithms on parallel architectures.