The Massive Memory Machine Project

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This project is directed at the investigation of supercomputers with massive amounts of physical memory, in the tens of billions of bytes. The hypothesis of the research is that such machines may change, in fundamental ways, how certain classes of problems are solved and may lead to orders of magnitude performance improvements. Efforts are underway to validate experimentally the massive memory hypothesis, to explore ways to build such a machine in the future, and to investigate selected algorithmic processes for such designs. The validation portion of the project will be carried out on a Large Memory Computer (LMC), a conventional computer with an unconventional but economically feasible amount of memory (either 128 or 256 MB). The second part of the project will involve the study of a number of novel architectures for machines with billions of bytes of memory. A full-scale Massive Memory Machine prototype capable of supporting billions of bytes of memory will be constructed.