VLSI support for a cactus stack oriented memory organization

A cactus stack is a set of stacks organized as a tree in which each path from the root to any leaf constitutes a stack. Such a stack organization is required in the implementation of some block-structured parallel languages (e.g. Ada), and cannot be implemented efficiently in traditional memory organizations. VLSI-based mechanisms for efficient support of the memory sharing specified by the cactus stack are suggested. The implementation is demonstrated for an MIMD multiprocessor with distributed, shared memory but is applicable also to other computer organizations. The sharing is supported by a novel associative memory structure that maps arbitrarily sized segments in different logical address spaces onto one linear virtual address space. It is shown that it can be implemented with a performance comparable to traditional translation look-aside buffers with respect to both chip area and time.<>