Today we see the standard trade-off between
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Memory Hierarchy as in a Shared Memory SGI Power Challenge
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Distributed Memory as in IBM SP-2
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And indeed a merging of these ideas with Distributed Shared Memory
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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
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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.
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Will increased memory hierarchy make its management so much harder so that trade off will change ?
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Management of year 2005 distributed memory does not get much harder from systems we are familiar with today?
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