Active pages: a computation model for intelligent memory

  • Authors:
  • Mark Oskin;Frederic T. Chong;Timothy Sherwood

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis;Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis;Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Microprocessors and memory systems suffer from a growing gap in performance. We introduce Active Pages, a computation model which addresses this gap by shifting data-intensive computations to the memory system. An Active Page consists of a page of data and a set of associated functions which can operate upon that data. We describe an implementation of Active Pages on RADram (Reconfigurable Architecture DRAM), a memory system based upon the integration of DRAM and reconfigurable logic. Results from the SimpleScalar simulator [BA97] demonstrate up to 1000X speedups on several applications using the RADram system versus conventional memory systems. We also explore the sensitivity of our results to implementations in other memory technologies.