Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 21 October 1995

Foil 10 Types of Parallel Memory Architectures -- Physical Characteristics

From New CPS615 Foils-- B 28 August 95 CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 95. by Geoffrey C. Fox
1 Uniform: All processors take the same time to reach all memory locations.
2 Nonuniform (NUMA): Memory access is not uniform so that it takes a different time to get data by a given processor from each memory bank. This is natural for distributed memory machines but also true in most modern shared memory machines
  • DASH (Hennessey at Stanford) is best known example of such a virtual shared memory machine which is logicall shared but physically distributed.
  • ALEWIFE from MIT is a similar project
  • TERA (from Burton Smith) is Uniform memory access logically shared memory machine
3 Most NUMA machines these days have two memory access times
  • Local memory (divided in registers caches etc) and
  • Nonlocal memory with little or no difference in access time for different nonlocal memories
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© on Tue Oct 7 1997