• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.102-110
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• 2009

The memory wall is the growing disparity of speed between CPU and memory outside the CPU chip. An economical solution is a memory hierarchy organized into several levels, such as processor registers, cache, main memory, disk storage. We introduce a novel memory hierarchy optimization technique in Linux based embedded systems using on-chip SRAM for the first time. The optimization technique allocates On-Chip SRAM to the code/data that selected by programmers by using virtual memory systems. Experiments performed with nine applications indicate that the runtime improvements can be achieved by up to 35%, with an average of 14%, and the energy consumption can be reduced by up to 40%, with an average of 15%.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.391-397
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• 2015

Nonvolatile memories in memory hierarchy have been investigated to reduce its energy consumption because nonvolatile memories consume zero leakage power in memory cells. One of the difficulties is, however, that the endurance of most nonvolatile memory technologies is much shorter than the conventional SRAM and DRAM technology. This has limited its usage to only the low levels of a memory hierarchy, e.g., disks, that is far from the CPU. In this paper, we study the use of a new type of nonvolatile memories - the Phase Change Memory (PCM) with a DRAM buffer system as the main memory. Our design reduced the total energy of a DRAM main memory of the same capacity by 80%. These results indicate that it is feasible to use PCM technology in place of DRAM in the main memory for better energy efficiency.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.262-269
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• 2005

Semiconductor scientists and engineers ideally desire the faster but the cheaper non-volatile memory devices. In practice, no single device satisfies this desire because a faster device is expensive and a cheaper is slow. Therefore, in this paper, we use heterogeneous non-volatile memories and construct an efficient hierarchy for them. First, a small RAM device (e.g., MRAM, FRAM, and PRAM) is used as a write buffer of flash memory devices. Since the buffer is faster and does not have an erase operation, write can be done quickly in the buffer, making the write latency short. Also, if a write is requested to a data stored in the buffer, the write is directly processed in the buffer, reducing one write operation to flash storages. Second, we use many types of flash memories (e.g., SLC and MLC flash memories) in order to reduce the overall storage cost. Specifically, write requests are classified into two types, hot and cold, where hot data is vulnerable to be modified in the near future. Only hot data is stored in the faster SLC flash, while the cold is kept in slower MLC flash or NOR flash. The evaluation results show that the proposed hierarchy is effective at improving the access time of flash memory storages in a cost-effective manner thanks to the locality in memory accesses.

• Vacuum Magazine
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.4-8
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• 2014

Since the modern computer architecture was suggested by Von Neumann in 1945, computer has become inevitable for our life. This brilliant growth of computer has been led by device miniaturization trend, so called Moore's law. Especially, the explosive growth of memory devices such as DRAM and Flash have played key role in huge enlarging utilization of computer. However, abrupt increase of data used for many applications in big data era provoke the excessive energy consumption of data center which results from the inefficiency of conventional memory-storage hierarchy. As a solution, the application of new memory devices has been brought up for innovative memory-storage hierarchy. In this paper, the current development status and prospect of new memory devices will be discussed.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.34 no.9
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• pp.445-458
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• 2007

This article presents a novel infrastructure for large-memory database processing using commodity hardware with operating system support. We exploit inexpensive PCs and a high-speed network capable of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) operations to build a new memory hierarchy between fast volatile memory and slow disk storage. The new memory hierarchy guarantees a reasonable response time, and its storage size enables us to run large-memory database systems with little performance degradation. The proposed architecture has two main components: (1) a remote memory system inside the Linux kernel to manage other computers' memory pages efficiently and (2) a remote memory pager responsible for manipulating remote read/write operations on remote memory pages. We insist that the proposed architecture is practical enough to support the rigorous demands of commercial in-memory database systems by demonstrating the performance of publicly available main-memory databases (e.g., MySQL) on our prototyped system. The experimental results show very interesting results from the TPC-C benchmark.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.157-164
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• 2005

With the advances of wireless technologies and mobile computing, m-commerce is being realized on many kinds of mobile devices. Service contents for m-commerce are usually newly written to meet specific characteristics of user's mobile devices, thus requiring formidable efforts. So, it is very important to effectively exploit the Internet product information currently being provided for e-commerce. However, bringing those Internet contents to mobile devices is far from straightforward due to the limitations of mobile devices such as little memory, small displays, low processing speeds, and so forth. In this paper, assuming that the Internet products are represented in XML, we suggest four methods to construct the object hierarchy for effectively viewing the documents on the mobile devices. We then compare and analyze them by experiments in terms of response times and required memory size.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.37-47
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• 2012

One of the major goals in high school Informatics is for students to develop creative problem-solving abilities based on knowledge on computer science. Thus, the contents of the textbooks should be accurate and appropriate. However, we discovered that the current Informatics textbooks contain the untrue and/or inappropriate descriptions of main memory and virtual memory. The textbooks describe that main memory is composed of RAM and ROM. The virtual memory is described as a technique in which a part of the secondary storage is utilized as main memory to execute an application of which size is larger than that of main memory. In this study, we attempted to uncover the root causes of the fallacies, and suggest the accurate explanations by comparing with renowned books adopted in most schools worldwide including USA. Our study reveals that it is inappropriate to include ROM in main memory from the memory hierarchy perspective. Virtual memory is a technique that provides convenience to programmers, through which an operating system loads the necessary portion of a program from secondary storage to main memory. As for the advantages of virtual memory in the current computer systems, the focus should be on providing the effective multitasking capability, rather than on executing a larger program than the size of main memory. We suggest that it is appropriate to exclude virtual memory in textbooks considering its complexity.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.6-11
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• 2018

As embedded memory technology evolves, the traditional Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) technology has reached the end of development. For deepening the manufacturing process technology, the next generation memory technology is highly required because of the exponentially increasing leakage current of SRAM. Non-volatile memories such as STT-MRAM (Spin Torque Transfer Magnetic Random Access Memory), PCM (Phase Change Memory) are good candidates for replacing SRAM technology in embedded memory systems. They have many advanced characteristics in the perspective of power consumption, leakage power, size (density) and latency. Nonetheless, nonvolatile memories have two major problems that hinder their use it the next-generation memory. First, the lifetime of the nonvolatile memory cell is limited by the number of write operations. Next, the write operation consumes more latency and power than the same size of the read operation.These disadvantages can be solved using the compiler. The disadvantage of non-volatile memory is in write operations. Therefore, when the compiler decides the layout of the data, it is solved by optimizing the write operation to allocate a lot of data to the SRAM. This study provides insights into how these compiler and architectural designs can be developed.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.7-14
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• 2017

Due to the recent advances in Phage-Change Memory (PCM) technologies, a new memory hierarchy of computer systems with PCM is expected to appear. In this paper, we present a new page replacement policy that adopts PCM as a high speed swap device. As PCM has limited write endurance, our goal is to minimize the amount of data written to PCM. To do so, we defer the eviction of dirty pages in proportion to their dirtiness. However, excessive preservation of dirty pages in memory may deteriorate the page fault rate, especially when the memory capacity is not enough to accommodate full working-set pages. Thus, our policy monitors the current working-set size of the system, and controls the deferring level of dirty pages not to degrade the system performances. Simulation experiments show that the proposed policy reduces the write traffic to PCM by 160% without performance degradations.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2012.11a
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• pp.197-199
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• 2012

Recently, a lot of general-purpose application programs in addition to graphic applications have been parallelized for boosting their performance using Graphic Processing Unit (GPU)'s excellent floating-point performance. In order to maximize the application performance on GPUs, optimizing the memory hierarchy and the on-chip caches such as the shared memory is essential. In this paper, we propose techniques to optimize the shared memory, and verify its effectiveness using a pattern matching application program.