Basic HTML version of Foils prepared August 4 1996

Foil 7 Memory Hierarchy versus Distribution

From Summary of Working Groups at PAWS and PetaSoft Meetings PAWS(Mandalay Beach) and PetSoft(Bodega Bay) -- April 23 and June 17-19,96. by Geoffrey C. Fox


1 Today we see the standard trade-off between
  • Memory Hierarchy as in a Shared Memory SGI Power Challenge
  • Distributed Memory as in IBM SP-2
  • And indeed a merging of these ideas with Distributed Shared Memory
2 Most people believe that it is easier to manage hierarchy (in an "automatic" fashion as in a compiler) than it is to manage distributed memory
3 PIM gives us a classic distributed memory system as base design where as most other proposals (including Superconducting) give a shared memory as base design with hierarchy as issue.
  • Will increased memory hierarchy make its management so much harder so that trade off will change ?
  • Management of year 2005 distributed memory does not get much harder from systems we are familiar with today?

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