Patent ID: 8271635

Claim:
A physical computer program product comprising one or more physical computer-readable storage devices having stored thereon the following: one or more address accessing computer-executable instructions that is or are structured such that, when executed by one or more processors of a computing system, the computing system is caused to access an address; one or more state maintaining computer-executable instructions that is or are structured such that, when executed by the one or more processors, the computing system maintains a correlation between a plurality of addresses and multiple address-level states, the multiple address-level states including at least a first address-level state and a second address-level state, wherein the correlation is maintained using a correlation data structure that, at a first tier, correlates each of a plurality of sub-groups of the plurality of addresses to a corresponding one of at least three group-level states including a first group-level state that represents that all of the addresses in the corresponding sub-group of addresses have the first address-level state, a second group-level state that represents that all of the addresses in the corresponding sub-group of addresses have the second address-level state, and a third group-level state that represents that the corresponding sub-group of addresses have a mix of address-level states, and that, at a second tier, correlates each of the addresses for at least one of the sub-groups of addresses to a corresponding one of the at least two address-level states; and one or more state determination computer-executable instructions that is or are structured such that, when executed by the one or more processors, the computing system determines a state of an address accessed by the one or more address accessing computer-executable instructions by identifying a group-level state of the sub-group of addresses in which the address belongs, determining that the address-level state of the address is the first address-level state if the identified group-level state is the first group-level state, determining that the address-level state of the address is the second address-level state if the identified group-level state is the second group-level state, and performing further processing if the identified group-level state is the third group-level state, by at least referring to the second tier to identify an address-level state of the address.