Evaluation of a Fast Activation Mechanism for the Kanerva SDM Memory
Roland Karlsson · 1995
T he Kanerva Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) is a mechanism for implementing a memory with a huge address space. The physical memory consists of substantially fewer locations than the virtual address space. In earlier implementations of the SDM memory the addresses of all physical locations had to be scanned to determine which locations to activate. This is time-consuming, and massive parallel hardware support is needed for other than small applications. This paper introduces a new mechanism for finding the active locations. Using this access mechanism, the access time may be speeded up several orders of magnitude. Keywords: SDM, sparse distributed memory, selected-coordinate design. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 The Jaeckel Selected-Coordinate Design 2 3 The New Selected-Coordinate Design 2 4 Results 4 5 Conclusions 4 1 Real World Computing Partnership 2 Swedish Institute of Computer Science 1 Introduction T he Kanerva Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) [4, 5] is a clever mecha...