Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Section on Emerging Memory Technologies in Very Large Scale Computing and Storage Systems

The eleven papers in this special section focus on both system- and circuit-level aspects of emerging memory and storage technologies. The overwhelmingly increasing demand for both storage and computation necessitates revisiting the traditional memory subsystems used in processors and storage systems to take advantage of emerging memory technologies. Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) have been ubiquitously used for decades as main memory and as on-chip cache, respectively. Scaling and power issues of these traditional memory technologies have led to significant investment in emerging memory technologies. On the other hand, fundamental limitations of mechanical disk drives have brought great attention to further explore the design space of solid-state drives (SSDs). The promising features of emerging memory technologies such as low power consumption, increased performance, lower susceptibility to particle strikes, and higher bit density have prompted researchers to seek new organizations in the different memory-hierarchy levels, to propose new circuitry and algorithms to improve performance and reduce power consumption, and to develop new schemes to enhance system reliability.