Sally McKee, who coined the term "the memory wall", has died

(online-tribute.com)

96 points by deater6 hours ago

4 comments

deater5 hours ago
There are probably so many stories out there of interesting things she did. A few are breifly referenced at her old website here: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060116130917/http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~sam/personal.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20060116130917/http://www.csl.co...</a>
- codaea39 minutes ago
 Her babysitter was Mike Bloomfield!? (the astronaut)
- tkhattra41 minutes ago
 rip. i got a chuckle out of this trivia on her old website:> Rob Pike didn't really name my favorite editor after me.
DespairYeMighty6 hours ago
She was a CS PhD and somewhat itinerant professor with a long career who wrote a prominent CS paper about computer memory, Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588</a>on her obituary page, you will see a prominent "Memory Wall" link that is NOT a reference to her paper, but a place for sharing your thoughts about her life
- deater5 hours ago
 you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee"I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor
 - marricks4 hours ago
 There's only two authors! That's so rude!
 - setgree1 hour ago
 It’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)
 - bjourne1 hour ago
 Why? For all the automatic academic score tracking systems it doesn't matter one bit if it is Wulf et al. or Wulf and McKee.
 - mattkrause9 minutes ago
 The automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia.I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.
 - john_strinlai1 hour ago
 its about respect, not about academic score tracking systems
 - SecretDreams2 hours ago
 et al should never be applied when only two authors!!!
 - fsckboy45 minutes ago
 ...unless the second one is named Alfred and is an informal person
- b473a3 hours ago
 Yeah tenure is nice but there's just a hint of mystery behind the title "itinerant professor." Like a wizard that just pops up in places to work computer science magic.
akkartik6 hours ago
My dissertation was on the memory wall, and I never heard of her :/ RIP
- AnimalMuppet4 hours ago
 Could you (or someone else in the know) give us a brief overview of the current state of the memory wall issue?
 - Veserv49 minutes ago
 High bandwidth memory (HBM) can deliver TB/s of memory bandwidth and has completely shattered the memory wall for individual cores/compute elements. The only way for compute to keep up is going wide and parallel as seen in GPUs.Despite this, massively increased memory bandwidth does not translate to material performance improvements on non-parallel compute tasks because few tasks are actually memory bandwidth bound, instead being memory latency bound.The best known general solutions for improving memory latency are per-compute element memory caches. Unfortunately, this increases the complexity and size of your compute elements forcing you to reduce the number of compute elements, but a large number of compute elements is the only way to saturate HBM memory bandwidth.To keep up the best known techniques are either algorithmically batch which allows you to go wide using vector/batch instructions or you go the GPU route with memory latency-hiding parallelism.
 - akkartik3 hours ago
 Oh my knowledge is woefully out of date. But I believe the memory wall is a fact of life for the most part. Like many others, I nibbled around the edges of the constraint at massive cost in increased complexity. Outside of very specific exceptions the cure tends to be worse than the disease.
 - dirtbagskier3 hours ago
 [dead]
dyauspitr1 hour ago
I’m never heard of that term.
- northes1 hour ago
  Thanks for your contribution, then.