"The past 30 or 40 years of hardware and operating-systems development seems to have only marginally impinged on the agenda in CS departments' algorithmic analysis sections, and as far as my anecdotal evidence, it has totally failed to register in the education they provide."
Cache-Oblivious Algorithms and Data Structures - Erik Demaine
http://erikdemaine.org/papers/BRICS2002/paper.pdf
Abstract:
A recent direction in the design of cache-efficient and disk- efficient algorithms and data structures is the notion of cache obliviousness, introduced by Frigo, Leiserson, Prokop, and Ramachandran in 1999. Cache-oblivious algorithms perform well on a multilevel memory hierarchy without knowing any parameters of the hierarchy, only knowing the existence of a hierarchy. Equivalently, a single cache-oblivious algorithm is efficient on all memory hierarchies simultaneously. While such results might seem impossible, a recent body of work has developed cache-oblivious algorithms and data structures that perform as well or nearly as well as standard external-memory structures which require knowledge of the cache/memory size and block transfer size. Here we describe several of these results with the intent of elucidating the techniques behind their design. Perhaps the most exciting of these results are the data structures, which form general building blocks immediately leading to several algorithmic results.
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Cache-Oblivious Algorithms - Thesis - Harald Prokop - 1999