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Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

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Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#181

Post by sedachv »

sebastianavina wrote: post #73
Shivetya wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different than IBM's single store model? Memory and disk are addressed as one with hardware providing the protection needed in case of component or system failure. Unless your writing at the machine level I really do not see the need for most programmers to ever concern themselves with storage, that should be the work of the underlying machine code and/or OS.

if ram and permanent storage becomes the same, in instance, you wont need to "open(" a file, just to point to the memory location of it.

That's how the AS/400 works.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#182

Post by sedachv »

spitfire wrote: post #117
NamTaf wrote: post #3

I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions about how you program stuff change quite significantly and it's really exciting.

IBM went all the way with this in the AS/400 back in the 80's. Single level store - RAM and disk were unified storage. with no ability for a programmer to tell the difference (RAM was purely and operations problem).

The single-level store started with Soltis' System/38 in the 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/38

I really recommend Frank Soltis' Inside the AS/400 if you are interested in computer architecture and virtualization.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#183

Post by doubt_me »

petercooper wrote: post #7
NamTaf wrote: post #3

I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions about how you program stuff change quite significantly and it's really exciting.

Memristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even promise to bring computation and storage together.

I thought HP had been working on it since at least 2008 (when I heard they got it to work)

I just assumed they are integrating it into their new super computer

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#184

Post by sedachv »

sjtrny wrote: post #150
amalag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AMD is aiming towards a shared GPU/CPU architecture too.

I'm really excited for shared RAM between GPU and CPU. At the moment GPU acceleration is limited by the meagre amount of VRAM on most desktop cards. I would love to be able to do GPU programming with a 32+GB RAM pool.

Using the system RAM is how a lot of on-board budget graphics chips used to (still do?) work.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#185

Post by nitrogen »

mrb wrote: post #122

You can tell SanDisk's performance numbers do not add up and that they are likely misrepresenting the true performance of their device. (Those red asterisks next to the numbers correspond to a footnote that is conveniently missing from the page...) A "read latency of 150usec" translates to maximum possible read IOPS rate of 1/150e-6 = 6.67K (with one outstanding I/O). But they quote a "random read IOPS of 140K". That…

But to the best of my knowledge, DDR3 is limited to 8 banks/DIMM, so there could not possibly be more than 8 concurrent read I/O at any one time.

Maybe you can submit more than 8 queued requests to the controller and have them stream back at the full DDR3 data rate. Maybe it's not actually addressable as RAM, it just uses the DDR3 interface as a communication bus.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#186

Post by achille2 »

gnufied wrote: post #20
zrail wrote: post #8

I don't quite understand. Does this act like a stick of memory or an SSD? Is it just using the memory controller as a super fast parallel bus? If it does act like normal memory, what happens at reboot?

Answer is there in FAQ. Written data is not lost on reboot, so basically you can mount it as a `ramdisk` partition and use that as data directory for your database. I have used this approach in past to speed up large test suite of a web application, except it required restoring from some sort of backup on reboot. Which won't be necessary in this case.

Does this mean you won't have traditional memory available at all (outside of L1-3 cache)? Or is it able to mix and match between real DDR3 memory and SSD?

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#187

Post by micampe »

jjoonathan wrote: post #105
micampe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with you one bit, but I find it funny that you say: “we can't currently break them, so tradeoffs will always exist.” :) (That “currently” is just a weasel word, but this being the Internet I understand why you put it there)

It is highly probable that we will discover memory that is better than current memory in every relevant metric (I suspect this is what you think you are claiming). It is highly improbable that this new technology cannot be optimized in any relevant metric by trading off optimality in a different metric (this is what you are actually claiming).

The sentence “I'm certain the tradeoffs will change” implies that both your interpretations are wrong.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#188

Post by sjtrny »

sedachv wrote: post #184
sjtrny wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really excited for shared RAM between GPU and CPU. At the moment GPU acceleration is limited by the meagre amount of VRAM on most desktop cards. I would love to be able to do GPU programming with a 32+GB RAM pool.

Using the system RAM is how a lot of on-board budget graphics chips used to (still do?) work.

Yes but they are limited by the manufacturer as to how much of that RAM they can occupy and it also seems to be limited to only onboard GPUs.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#189

Post by silon5 »

realharo wrote: post #112
tokenizerrr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you have plentiful persistent RAM an application could easily "suspend" itself (on shutdown for example), and then resume running at a later point in time. The code would not have to think about this, since the entire state is just snapshotted. It's basically what machines do now when they "hibernate", except more effecient and could even happen if the power got cut. Additionally I suppose your variables cou…

Can't wait for the persistent memory leaks!

Or losing data on crash because load/save cycle is untested.
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