An intelligent memory system

Abstract

SWIM(Structured Wafer-Scale Intelligent Memory) is a high bandwidth, multi-ported, disk-sized memory system capable of storing, maintaining, and manipulating data structures within it, independent of the main processing units. Up to thousands of active storage elements, each element having some storage and some associated processing logic, function independently or in groups to implement userdefined objects. SWIM increases memory functionality to better balance the time spent in moving data with that involved in actually manipulating it. Just as one may associate a cache with each processor, each memory module has processing logic associated with it. Such logic decreases the processormemory bandwidth requirements, improves memory utilization, scales better in a multiprocessor, and yields a faster response from memory. The faster response results from proximity, a specialized micro architecture and parallelism.