A Comparison of Two Memory Models for High Performance Computers

High performance scientific computers require high bandwidth memory systems. The size of data sets for large scientific codes implies the need for a memory system which contains independent, interleaved banks. We compare the performance of two different control structures for an interleaved memory: bank buffering and address stream lookahead. We show that a centralized lookahead memory controller provides equivalent memory performance to a bank buffering system while simplifying implementation.