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Memory subsystems have been considered as one of the most critical components in embedded systems and furthermore, displaying increasing complexity as application requirements diversify. Modern embedded systems are generally equipped with multiple heterogeneous memory devices to satisfy diverse requirements and constraints. NAND flash memory has been widely adopted for data storage because of its outstanding benefits on cost, power, capacity and nonvolatility. However, in NAND flash memory, the intrinsic costs for the read and write accesses are highly disproportionate in performance and access granularity. The consequent data management complexity and performance deterioration have precluded the adoption of NAND flash memory. In this paper, we introduce a highly effective non-volatile primary memory architecture which incorporates application specific information to develop a NAND flash based primary memory. The proposed architecture provides a unified non-volatile primary memory solution which relieves design complications caused by the growing complexity in memory subsystems. Our architecture aggressively minimizes the overhead and redundancy of the NAND based systems by exploiting efficient address space management and dynamic data migration based on accurate application behavioral analysis. We also propose a highly parallelized memory architecture through an active and dynamic data redistribution over the multiple flash memories based on run-time workload analysis. The experimental results show that our proposed architecture significantly enhances average memory access cycle time which is comparable to the standard DRAM access cycle time and also considerably prolongs the device life-cycle by autonomous wear-leveling and minimizing the program/erase operations.

The creation of a contemporary artwork -The Scalable City-explores the possibilities and implications of new technologies in general and the Cell processor (CP) in particular. In general, new technologies provide new methods for describing and acting in the world. Creating new forms of art can be a means of understanding and furthering this process; however, this has not been the typical relationship between the leading edges of cultural and technological experiments in the 20th century. The approaches taken to create The Scalable City provide an example of how these goals can correlate in an effective way, as its aim is the creation of a 3D interactive graphics application, highlighting the ongoing algorithmicization of the world at large. In its creation, computational bottlenecks have been encountered, which compromised its aesthetic and conceptual goals. The core component of this work is a world depicting transforming landscapes, networks of roads and emergent structures. Within the operation of the artwork, each is transformed by interactions of the viewer, algorithms and the initial data. The computational demands of some of these transformations exceed the capability of standard methods using a single host compute environment. Sheldon Brown and the members of his Experimental Game Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD developed means of using CP compute servers to overcome these limitations. The authors detail their encounters with Cell processing, from initial efforts, discovery of the affordances and limitations of Cell processing, and its eventual application to the project.

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