SpringerLink
Log in

Memory Hierarchy

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 72 Accesses

Synonyms

Hierarchical memory system

Definition

A Hierarchical Memory System – or Memory Hierarchy for short – is an economical solution to provide computer programs with (virtually) unlimited fast memory, taking advantage of locality and cost-performance of memory technology. Computer storage and memory hardware – from disk drives to DRAM main memory to SRAM CPU caches – shares the limitation that as they became faster, they become more expensive (per capacity), and thus smaller. Consequently, memory hierarchies are organized into several levels, starting from huge and inexpensive but slow disk systems to DRAM main memory and SRAM CPU caches (both off and on chip) to registers in the CPU core. Each level closer to the CPU is faster but smaller than the next level one step down in the hierarchy. Memory hierarchies exploit the principle of locality, i.e., the property that computer programs do not access all their code and data uniformly, but rather focus on referencing only small...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  1. Ailamaki A, Boncz PA, Manegold S, editors. In: Proceedings workshop on data management on new hardware. 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ailamaki A, Boncz PA, Manegold S, editors. In: Proceedings workshop on data management on new hardware. 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ailamaki A, Luo Q, editors. In: Proceedings workshop on data management on new hardware. 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ailamaki AG, DeWitt DJ., Hill MD, Wood DA. DBMSs on a modern processor: where does time go? In: Proceedings 25th international conference on very large data bases. 1999. p. 266–77.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Boncz PA, Manegold S, Kersten M. Database architecture optimized for the New Bottleneck: memory access. In: Proceedings 25th international conference on very large data bases. 1999. p. 54–65.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Denning PJ. The working set model for program behaviour. Commun ACM. 1968;11(5):323–33.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Denning PJ. The locality principle. Commun ACM. 2005;48(7):19–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Hennessy JL, Patterson DA. Computer architecture – a quantitative approach. 3rd ed. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann; 2003.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Hill MD, Smith AJ. Evaluating associativity in CPU caches. IEEE Trans Comput. 1989;38(12):1612–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Kilburn T, Edwards DBC, Lanigan MI, Sumner FH. One-level storage system. IRE Trans Electronic Comput. 1962;2(11):223–35.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Manegold S. Understanding, modeling, and improving main-memory database performance. PhD thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Moore GE. Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics. 1965;38(8):114–7.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ross K, Luo Q, editors. In: Proceedings workshop on data management on new hardware. 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Shatdal A, Kant C, Naughton J. Cache conscious algorithms for relational query processing. In: Proceedings 20th international conference on very large data bases. 1994. p. 510–2.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stefan Manegold

Authors
  1. Stefan Manegold
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefan Manegold .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Informatique et Communications, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 14, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Anastasia Ailamaki

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

Manegold, S. (2016). Memory Hierarchy. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_657-2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_657-2

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation