SCIMA: Software Controlled Integrated Memory Architecture for high performance computing

Processor performance has been improved due to clock acceleration and ILP extraction techniques. Performance of main memory, however, has not been improved so much. The performance gap between processor and memory will be growing further in the future. This is very serious problem in high performance computing because effective performance is limited by memory ability in most cases. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a new VLSI architecture called SCIMA which integrates software controllable memory into a processor chip. Most of data access is regular in high performance computing. The software controllable memory is more suitable for making good use of the regularity than conventional cache. This paper presents its architecture and performance evaluation. The evaluation results reveal the superiority of SCIMA compared with conventional cache-based architecture.