Sally McKee, who coined the term "the memory wall", has died • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by SecretDreams » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

deater wrote: post #4

DespairYeMighty wrote: post #3

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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588 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

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

et al should never be applied when only two authors!!!

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

#12

Post by bjourne » Fri, May 01, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

marricks wrote: post #6

deater wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's only two authors! That's so rude!

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.

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

#13

Post by dyauspitr » Fri, May 01, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

I’m never heard of that term.

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

#14

Post by northes » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #13

I’m never heard of that term.

Thanks for your contribution, then.

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

#15

Post by john_strinlai » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #12

marricks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only two authors! That's so rude!

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.

its about respect, not about academic score tracking systems

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

#16

Post by setgree » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

marricks wrote: post #6

deater wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's only two authors! That's so rude!

It’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)

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

#17

Post by Veserv » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #7

akkartik wrote: post #2

My dissertation was on the memory wall, and I never heard of her :/ RIP

Could you (or someone else in the know) give us a brief overview of the current state of the memory wall issue?

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.

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

#18

Post by fsckboy » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

SecretDreams wrote: post #11

deater wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

et al should never be applied when only two authors!!!

...unless the second one is named Alfred and is an informal person

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

#19

Post by tkhattra » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

deater wrote: post #5

There are probably so many stories out there of interesting things she did. A few are breifly referenced at her old website here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060116130917/http://www.csl.co...

rip. i got a chuckle out of this trivia on her old website:

> Rob Pike didn't really name my favorite editor after me.

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

#20

Post by codaea » Fri, May 01, 2026, 8:46 PM UTC

deater wrote: post #5

There are probably so many stories out there of interesting things she did. A few are breifly referenced at her old website here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060116130917/http://www.csl.co...

Her babysitter was Mike Bloomfield!? (the astronaut)