Increasing processor clock speeds, along with microarchitectural innovation, have led to a tremendous gap between processor and memory performance. The PUMA2 (Proactively Uniform Memory Access Architecture) project targets designing memory systems that bridge this gap in the presence of arbitrarily-irregular but repetitive memory access patterns. Babak Falsafi presents a memory model and technique which ends the debate over whether multiprocessors must support relaxed memory models. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2002