Big memory computers are machines with a large amount of

random-access memory Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of Computer memory, electronic computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working Data (computing), data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows ...

(RAM). The computers are required for databases, graph analytics, or more generally,

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

and

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

. Some database systems called

in-memory database An in-memory database (IMDb, or main memory database system (MMDB) or memory resident database) is a database management system that primarily relies on main memory for computer data storage. It is contrasted with database management systems that e ...

s are designed to run mostly in memory, rarely if ever retrieving data from disk or flash memory. See

list of in-memory databases Notable in-memory database system software includes: References {{cite web , title=Stackshare Top In-Memory Databases , url=https://stackshare.io/in-memory-databases#:~:text=Redis%2C%20Hazelcast%2C%20Aerospike%2C%20SAP,reason%20why%20Hazelcast% ...

Details

The performance of big memory systems depends on how the

central processing units A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

(CPUs) access the memory, via a conventional

memory controller A memory controller, also known as memory chip controller (MCC) or a memory controller unit (MCU), is a digital circuit that manages the flow of data going to and from a computer's main memory. When a memory controller is integrated into anothe ...

or via

non-uniform memory access Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer storage, computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to the processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory ...

(NUMA). Performance also depends on the size and design of the

CPU cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, whi ...

. Performance also depends on

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

(OS) design. The huge pages feature in Linux and other OSes can improve the efficiency of

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...

. The transparent huge pages feature in Linux can offer better performance for some big-memory workloads. The "Large-Page Support" in Microsoft Windows enables server applications to establish large-page memory regions which are typically three orders of magnitude larger than the native page size.

References

{{reflist Big data Data management Distributed computing problems Technology forecasting Transaction processing