Dell Products Inc.

Unisys Corporation

James W Frandeen

George W Harris, Jr

Shari J Nolan

Jeffery S Nespor

Everett E Groff

Norman S Dancer

Gregory Scott Triplett

A memory system with non-volatile integrated circuit memory devices including an interface for a high speed bus is described, supporting continuous writes at the bus speed, without the possibility of buffer overrun during most conditions. The system comprises an memory bus, an system buffer, an array of non-volatile storage units, such as flash memory devices, and an interconnect system supporting data transfer among the components. The array includes sets and subsets of non-volatile storage units, referred to herein for convenience as platters having multiple banks, banks having multiple columns, and columns having multiple storage units. The storage units comprises integrated circuit memory having page buffers, with input ports. In one example, the array includes two platters, eight banks per platter, four columns per bank, and eight storage units per column, for a total of 256 storage units. The system buffer includes at least the same number of stores as columns in each bank. The stores comprise FIFOs with from one to sixteen cycles deep. A triple nested loop is used to manage continuos transfer of data from the high speed bus into the much slower non-volatile integrated circuit memory.

High speed bus interface for non-volatile integrated circuit memory supporting continuous transfer

An apparatus is described, comprising a plurality of banks, each bank having a number of columns of non-volatile storage units, each non-volatile storage unit having an input buffer for storing a page of data, the page having an input coupled to the input buffer accepting an input portion of data of a page at a memory speed, the non-volatile storage units storing the data from the input buffer within a memory write time; a plurality of interface buffers; an input bus having an input bus speed which is faster than the memory speed, the input bus being coupled to the plurality of interface buffers; a bus system, connecting each of the plurality of interface buffers to the non-volatile storage units of a column in each of the plurality of banks, supplying data from the plurality of interface buffers to the inputs of the non-volatile storage units at the memory speed.

A CTOS network comprised of a plurality of workstations provides for virtual demand paging transparently across the network in a manner which permits a large virtual memory to efficiently be provided for each of a plurality of concurrently running applications on a CTOS workstation. Each application running on the workstation is provided with assigned pages and a local clock which operates based on the well known clock algorithm. A unique combination of local policy and global policy is used for page replacement which results in significantly more efficient management of available memory pages. The global policy includes an 'elbow room' enhancement which permits the global page replacement policy to better take into account the individual activity of the concurrently running applications. In addition, enhanced prefaulting and page cleaning are provided, whereby it is made significantly more likely that a running application will find a requested page in its local clock.

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Soquel, CA, United States of America

James W Frandeen