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Cray's New Solid State Storage

Posted by timothy on from the please-of-please-trickle-down-to-me dept.

Sivar writes: "Cray, a well known vendor of extremely fast supercomputing hardware, has introduced a storage system with a 224 GB capacity. The large size seems impressive, but the device can also transfer an unprecedented 80GB(!!) every second. That's more bandwidth than the main memory of most servers, and it's just for storage. For comparison's sake, a typical dual channel DDR motherboard has a bandwidth capacity of barely 4.2GB/sec." Yow.

9 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. Super storage, super price. by Keighvin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is more of a conglomeration of current technology into a pricy solution, not so much a stellar advance.

    --
    Any spoon would be too big.
  2. An interesting side effect... by Sivar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Get one of these, downgrade your system to 8MB RAM, and run everything from swap...

    Watch your system's responsiveness double.

    --
    Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
    1. Re:An interesting side effect... by geekoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      why use any RAM at all? That would be an interesting turn of events, wouldn't it? As a matter of fact, that might be an actual Paradigm Shift in computer architecture.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:An interesting side effect... by jbridge21 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Too many context switches makes your system go dog slow. While the transfer rate is extremely high, the latency of talking to a piece of storage that is perhaps several feet away, at the speed of light, is too high.

  3. New Measurement System? by MikeyLikesIt! · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second.

    I guess that using standard measurements (GB and GB/sec) just isn't intuitive enough! But why use the humane genome as a reference? Is that REALLY more intuitive to most people? Does anyone (besides geneticists) really understand how much information is in the human genome?

    --

    I dunno... What do you wanna do?

  4. Yeah Yeah... by Loki_1929 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But can it run Windows fast?

    --
    -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
  5. Overhead time? by truesaer · · Score: 2, Insightful
    80GB per second is impressive, but the transfer rate of existing drives is also plenty fast. The problem is that setup time, head seeks, and rotational delay make it slow for most data accesses which are small. This is of course the whole point of ram, caching, etc.

    Probably this is just useful for transfers of very large amounts of data, and is the same as other storage devices except for its large size...

    1. Re:Overhead time? by Dr.+Weird · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Just useful for transfers of very large amounts of data? Gee, is that what a high speed, 224 GB HD is good at? ;-)

      As someone who routinely works with large datasets ( > terrabyte uncompressed) as is typical for physical simulations I would LOVE to have one of these.

  6. Because they need it ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Read the press release:

    "With their 32-gigabyte central memories..."

    Of course they need a 224 GB "solid state device" ! Every worthwile competitor of theirs can just put 256GB of main memory in their big box.

    It looks to me that Cray can't easily address more than 32GB on their box, so they just use "extended memory" as a disk.

    Buy an IBM / HP / Sun top of the line, stack
    it with 256GB, and you can use 224GB as a file buffer. Or 128GB, or 16 GB, or whatever you do not use for something more important.

    You've been fooled by PR spin on a limitation :-)

    Like windows and 36bit addressing on Xeons...