Live data from Hacker News

Steve Wozniak's FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement

theverge.com

1–10 of 27 posts

Re: Steve Wozniak's FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement

#3
post #2

Steve Wozniak is a true hacker. Kudos for the achievement.

Agreed. He has been tinkering with and working towards this goal of his for some years now. Can't wait to see it get more exposure.

A bright mind is a bright mind is a bright mind.

Re: Steve Wozniak's FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement

#4
Does anyone know what this improvement actually is? The article makes it sound like their card is doing DMA to pinned user allocations, but that doesn't sound too revolutionary. I know next to nothing about storage controllers, but see the last many years of high-speed networking for an entire ecosystem based around that concept.

Re: Steve Wozniak's FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement

#5
post #4

Does anyone know what this improvement actually is? The article makes it sound like their card is doing DMA to pinned user allocations, but that doesn't sound too revolutionary. I know next to nothing about storage controllers, but see the last many years of high-speed networking for an entire ecosystem based around that concept.

Instead of using the flash as a "tier" of storage, like a normal hard drive accessed via standard OS primitives, it looks like they now provide an API to make the storage available to programs. The new API has much lower overhead and latency.

Re: Steve Wozniak's FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement

#8
post #4

Does anyone know what this improvement actually is? The article makes it sound like their card is doing DMA to pinned user allocations, but that doesn't sound too revolutionary. I know next to nothing about storage controllers, but see the last many years of high-speed networking for an entire ecosystem based around that concept.

OS bypass hasn't really been done for storage, so that's new in some sense.

Re: Steve Wozniak's FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement

#9
So it apparently makes their custom flash storage behave like RAM, and provides an API to OS and software developers to make use of it as such, but it's non-volatile, so everything persists in the case of power failure or reboot. Here's an informative quote from Wozniak from the press release:

"Instead of treating flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel subsystems that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory technology offers a platform with new programming primitives that can provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory."

http://www.fusionio.com/press-releases/fusion-io-breaks-one-...

Here's hoping the other company by which he's still nominally employed gets interested in this technology, so that many more can enjoy the benefits of this technology. It seems like storage is the main bottleneck for most computing these days, so this should save us a whole lot of man-years waiting for our computers.

Post reply on HN