Memory Systems

Is your memory hierarchy stopping your microprocessor from performing at the high level it should be? Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk shows you how to resolve this problem. The book tells you everything you need to know about the logical design and operation, physical design and operation, performance characteristics and resulting design trade-offs, and the energy consumption of modern memory hierarchies. You learn how to to tackle the challenging optimization problems that result from the side-effects that can appear at any point in the entire hierarchy. As a result you will be able to design and emulate the entire memory hierarchy. Understand all levels of the system hierarchy -Xcache, DRAM, and disk. Evaluate the system-level effects of all design choices. Model performance and energy consumption for each component in the memory hierarchy.

Assembled by the prominent psychologists Daniel Schacter and Endel Tulving, the contributions in "Memory Systems 1994" focus on the nature and number of memory systems in humans and animals. Together they present ideas from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience in a review of intriguing experimental outcomes at the cutting edge of this domain, grappling, often passionately, with the behavioral and neuroanatomical composition of memory systems and subsystems. Chapters are revised versions of contributions that appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. This book includes an integrated discussion of and cross-commentary on the earlier contributions. "A Bradford Book"

Current theories about human memory have been shaped by clinical observations and animal experiments. This doctrine holds that the medial temporal lobe subserves one memory system for explicit or declarative memories, while the basal ganglia subserves a separate memory system for implicit or procedural memories, including habits. Cortical areas outside the medial temporal lobe are said to function in perception, motor control, attention, or other aspects of executive function, but not in memory. 'The Evolution of Memory Systems' advances dramatically different ideas on all counts. It proposes that several memory systems arose during evolution and that they did so for the same general reason: to transcend problems and exploit opportunities encountered by specific ancestors at particular times and places in the distant past. Instead of classifying cortical areas in terms of mutually exclusive perception, executive, or memory functions, the authors show that all cortical areas contribute to memory and that they do so in their own ways-using specialized neural representations. The book also presents a proposal on the evolution of explicit memory. According to this idea, explicit (declarative) memory depends on interactions between a phylogenetically ancient navigation system and a representational system that evolved in humans to represent one's self and others. As a result, people embed representations of themselves into the events they experience and the facts they learn, which leads to the perception of participating in events and knowing facts. 'The Evolution of Memory Systems' is an important new work for students and researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and biology.

Push the limits of what C - and you - can do, with this high-intensity guide to the most advanced capabilities of C Key FeaturesMake the most of C’s low-level control, flexibility, and high performanceA comprehensive guide to C’s most powerful and challenging featuresA thought-provoking guide packed with hands-on exercises and examplesBook Description There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level. What you will learnBuild advanced C knowledge on strong foundations, rooted in first principlesUnderstand memory structures and compilation pipeline and how they work, and how to make most out of themApply object-oriented design principles to your procedural C codeWrite low-level code that’s close to the hardware and squeezes maximum performance out of a computer systemMaster concurrency, multithreading, multi-processing, and integration with other languagesUnit Testing and debugging, build systems, and inter-process communication for C programmingWho this book is for Extreme C is for C programmers who want to dig deep into the language and its capabilities. It will help you make the most of the low-level control C gives you.

The papers present in this text survey both distributed shared memory (DSM) efforts and commercial DSM systems. The book discusses relevant issues that make the concept of DSM one of the most attractive approaches for building large-scale, high-performance multiprocessor systems. The authors provide a general introduction to the DSM field as well as a broad survey of the basic DSM concepts, mechanisms, design issues, and systems. The book concentrates on basic DSM algorithms, their enhancements, and their performance evaluation. In addition, it details implementations that employ DSM solutions at the software and the hardware level. This guide is a research and development reference that provides state-of-the art information that will be useful to architects, designers, and programmers of DSM systems.

Is memory best regarded as comprising multiple independent systems, as a processing framework, tapped via different levels of processing, or as a complex function which can be used in a flexible manner? Here, international researchers and theorists present stimulating, self-contained, and balanced summaries of the theoretical and empiricaL positions shaping the field today.

We are pleased to present this collection of papers from the Second Workshop on Intelligent Memory Systems. Increasing die densities and inter chip communication costs continue to fuel interest in intelligent memory systems. Since the First Workshop on Mixing Logic and DRAM in 1997, technologies and systems for computation in memory have developed quickly. The focus of this workshop was to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss recent progress and future goals. The program committee selected 8 papers and 6 poster session abstracts from 29 submissions for inclusion in the workshop. Four to five members of the program committee reviewed each submission and their reviews were used to numerically rank them and guide the selection process. We believe that the resulting program is of the highest quality and interest possible. The selected papers cover a wide range of research topics such as circuit technology, processor and memory system architecture, compilers, operating systems, and applications. They also present a mix of mature projects, work in progress, and new research ideas. The workshop also included two invited talks. Dr. Subramanian Iyer (IBM Microelectronics) provided an overview of embedded memory technology and its potential. Dr. Mark Snir (IBM Research) presented the Blue Gene, an aggressive supercomputer system based on intelligent memory technology.

The State of Memory Technology Over the past decade there has been rapid growth in the speed of micropro cessors. CPU speeds are approximately doubling every eighteen months, while main memory speed doubles about every ten years. The International Tech nology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) study suggests that memory will remain on its current growth path. The ITRS short-and long-term targets indicate continued scaling improvements at about the current rate by 2016. This translates to bit densities increasing at two times every two years until the introduction of 8 gigabit dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, after which densities will increase four times every five years. A similar growth pattern is forecast for other high-density chip areas and high-performance logic (e.g., microprocessors and application specific inte grated circuits (ASICs)). In the future, molecular devices, 64 gigabit DRAMs and 28 GHz clock signals are targeted. Although densities continue to grow, we still do not see significant advances that will improve memory speed. These trends have created a problem that has been labeled the Memory Wall or Memory Gap.