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1. Introduction

One of the most vital resources that a computer needs to manage is its memory. After all, all software runs in memory and all data is stored in some form of memory.

The quantity of memory can be vastly different depending on the type of computer being considered.

For example the processing chip embedded in a chip and pin credit card or similar commercial card will have a tiny amount of memory to hold its encrypted data

Whilst a super-computer cluster as you find in the particle physics center, CERN (where the world wide web was invented) will have petabytes of memory to manage (1 million gigabytes)