Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

4 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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?