A COMPARISON OF 2 MEMORY MODELS FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTERS

High performance scientific computers require high bandwidth memory systems. The size of data sets for large scientific codes implies the need for a memory system which contains independent, interleaved banks. We compare the performance of two different control structures for an interleaved memory: bank buffering and address stream lookahead. We show that a centralized lookahead memory controller provides equivalent memory performance to a bank buffering system while simplifyiiig implementation.