MEMSYS 2020

Welcome to the Sixth International Symposium on Memory Systems, held virtually due to travel restrictions being in place [2020 has been a crazy year!]. Thank you so much for submitting your work; we think we have a very interesting program planned for you, one which could not have happened without your research, your insights, and your hard work. 

As we mentioned in the original Call for Papers, in the last few decades the memory system has become extremely important. Memory is slow, and this is the primary reason that computers don’t run significantly faster than they do. In large-scale computer installations such as the building-sized systems powering Google.com, Amazon.com, and the financial sector, memory is often the largest dollar cost as well as the largest dissipator of power and consumer of energy. Consequently, improvements in the memory system can have significant impact on the real world, improving power and energy, performance, and/or dollar cost. Several emerging technologies promise to make improvements in all of these dimensions, but they are still not widely understood and not well characterized. Lastly, many of the problems we see in the memory system are cross-disciplinary in nature — their solution would likely require work at all levels, from applications to circuits.

Thus, our primary goal with this conference is to showcase interesting ideas that would spark conversation between disparate groups — to get applications people and operating systems people and compiler people and system architecture people and interconnect people and circuits people to talk to each other about the larger problem. We believe that the first step has been taken successfully: the technical program contains plenty of material for you to discuss. The rest is completely in your hands: you, the participants, represent a wide diversity of disciplines within the field of computer design, and the true success of this conference will be measured by the degree to which you interact with each other and discuss the field’s many problems and potential solutions. Please help make this conference a fruitful experience for all, by participating in discussions and providing your insights. 

Thank you again for participating. I look forward to seeing your presentations!

Bruce Jacob, University of Maryland