Computer architecture research in the Dept. of Computer Science, The University of Newcastle: the Virtual Memory Research Group

Integrated circuit technology has enabled computers to have increasingly large physical memories. Existing memory management techniques partition this memory into blocks or`pages' of approximately 4,000 characters in size. However, as the size of physical memory increases , managing an increasingly large number of these pages becomes time-consuming and hence a source of computer system ineeciency. Using a range of larger sized pages can dramatically reduce the amount of memory management overhead imposed by a computer operating system. The authors have formed the Virtual Memory Research Group (VMRG) to conduct research on multiple reconngurable page sizes in large virtual memory systems and related research topics. Principal investigators are: { Michael Hannaford Investigating management of massive memory for distributed operating systems. Study the application of massive memory for diierent operating system models (e.g Standard UNIX, Object Oriented, Single Address Space operating systems) { David Koch Investigating application of multiple page sizes in a persistent architecture machine. This work is in conjunction with the University of Sydney. { David Channon Principal developer of the object oriented address Translation Simulation Framework called TSF 2]. Investigating the memory management issues of dynamic support for multiple reconngurable page sizes.