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Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

computerworld.com

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Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#31

Post by cleech »

Koromix wrote: post #27
nneonneo wrote: post #21

To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput , but latency . The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND. The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement ov…

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantag…

Memory addressable non-volatile storage instead of SSDs that process block storage read/write commands, and file-system improvements to allow direct mmap of file contents from NVM into your process address space without copying through RAM.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#32

Post by jacquesm »

Koromix wrote: post #27
nneonneo wrote: post #21

To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput , but latency . The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND. The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement ov…

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantag…

Files exist because persistent storage is slow, copying data from RAM to disk is slow and we'd like to have a way to refer by name to blobs of bytes, but in the end it is only there because it's a useful metaphor. If the metaphor gets in the way of our ability to use the storage medium you can either do a mapping (like the direct memory mapping you refer to), which in this case would almost be like a backwards compatibility layer, a more involved scheme where all RAM is backed by persistent storage and devices only keep a flag which objects are currently being worked on and which are stable (an 'open' file would simply be marked as currently in use by an application but there would be no explicit save, just an unlock), or a completely new system based on an image like architecture (see: smalltalk, some lisp implementations). There are some drawbacks to that model (such as harder collaborative development) but I see no reason that applications could not be packaged that way even if the development used a more traditional method.

It would be fairly trivial to layer a conventional filesystem on top of such a persistent object store to get the best of both worlds, which would - amongst others - give you instantaneous suspend and re-awaken and other goodies.

If true this will vastly change the way we use computers.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#33

Post by erik »

olavgg wrote: post #15
erik wrote: post #9

1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface? That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe 3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance. Or, alternatively, if the real world perf…

Basically on a PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum performance is 4000GB/s, in practice this is 3200-3500MB/s. With 4k random write, you will get maximum 800.000 to 875.000 iops per second. Consumer-grade SSD's barely manage to write 500-1000 iops when sending the ATA_CMD_FLUSH command unless they are lying which is really bad. Good read about consumer SSD performance: http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...

Right, elsewhere in these comments it was pointed out that they are talking about a 1,000x improvement in latency vs flash memory. If they are using PCIe x4 and x2, then it seems that their throughput isn't going to be much better than existing SSDs.

Improved 4k random read and write would of course sill be a big win.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#34

Post by gjulianm »

Koromix wrote: post #27
nneonneo wrote: post #21

To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput , but latency . The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND. The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement ov…

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantag…

I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better performance, but I don't see why it is obsolete.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#35

Post by nneonneo »

gjulianm wrote: post #34
Koromix wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantag…

I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better performance, but I don't see why it is obsolete.

10ns latency means that a file entry/inode/block is available just 10-30 CPU cycles after it is requested. Suddenly the 1000 CPU cycles spent dispatching the system call look very inefficient by comparison.

Obsolete might not be the right term, but there is essentially no way that open/read/write can take proper advantage of this kind of low latency storage. We are going to need a new way to abstract and interface with this persistent storage.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#36

Post by brixon »

nashashmi wrote: post #4
imperialdrive wrote: post #2

I just love this stuff! Storage minded for 20 years... all other tech aside, storage is what gets me up until sunrise researching... if 2017 sees this kind of tech, I'll be smitten :-D

Won't there come a time when 1000x speed increase will still be slow? The applications will mostly be on heavy data side like medical research and weather patterns, but it could also involve 3D photogrammetry taking in a trillion points.

Yes, but storage speeds and battery life are the two biggest pain points for computers. Non-Multi-threading applications are starting to become a pain point.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#37

Post by PeCaN »

sorenjan wrote: post #19
nashashmi wrote: post #3

If SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so, architecture of computers will change drastically.

Hewlett Packard Labs is working on something like that: http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/

Lately I hear they spend their days playing Duke Nukem Forever on GNU/Hurd instead of working on memristors.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#38

Post by baq »

so if you solder this accelerator onto a motherboard and make it a few times larger than your RAM, you get a super-low-latency L5-ish cache (where RAM is L4-ish) and, potentially, an ability to instantenously suspend and keep suspended without consuming any power at all, assuming RAM is mostly in the Optane cache at all times. sounds nice.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#39

Post by benlwalker »

Koromix wrote: post #27
nneonneo wrote: post #21

To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput , but latency . The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND. The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement ov…

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantag…

http://pmem.io - for byte addressable form factors

http://spdk.io - for block device form factors

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#40

Post by PeCaN »

spitfire wrote: post #12
batmansmk wrote: post #5

This will change deeply how we make desktop applications, as well as database management systems.

IBM AS/400 did this decades ago. It has a unified address space - you only see "space" not disk/ram split.

AS/400 still exists actually, under the name IBM i. I know a person who swears by them. It's a fascinating system. There are no files, only persistent objects living in a 128-bit address space. Downside: still uses EBCDIC….
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