On Data Structures and Memory Models by

In this thesis we study the limitations of data structures and how they can be overcome through careful consideration of the used memory models. The word RAM model represents the memory as a finite set of registers consisting of a constant number of unique bits. From a hardware point of view it is not necessary to arrange the memory as in the word RAM memory model. However, it is the arrangement used in computer hardware today. Registers may in fact share bits, or overlap their bytes, as in the RAM with Byte Overlap (RAMBO) model. This actually means that a physical bit can appear in several registers or even in several positions within one register. The RAMBO model of computation gives us a huge variety of memory topologies/models depending on the appearance sets of the bits. We show that it is feasible to implement, in hardware, other memory models than the word RAM memory model. We do this by implementing a RAMBO variant on a memory board for the PC100 memory bus. When alternativ