Slashdot Mirror
Cray's New Solid State Storage
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.
I'm impressed.
Of course, it probably won't work on ordinary computers (after all, sticking that onto a SCSI bus would be sort of a waste), but eventually we'll get our hands on this stuff.
Anybody dare to ask how much it costs?
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
"Nobody who has to ask what a yacht costs has any business owning one." -J.P. Morgan
Why else do you think a company with expensive products like Cray's would avoid posting prices online?
Since this is a solid state storage device its performance will be that of a RAM. This is the main reason why solid state storage is so attractive. There will be no read/write heads etc...
netcraft says it's solaris 8 and apache.
Of COURSE they're not hosting the machine on a cray. That's complete overkill, even for Cray themselves. The electrical costs alone would be on par with a top-of-the-line hosting package (I imagine).
S
ncludes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per
second
can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100
Human Genomes per second
Ok, so can it hold more data than it can transfer in a second, or can it transfer more data in a second than it can hold? Pick one, boys.
With virtual memory hardware, you can write an operating system that simulates non-volatile main memory, using hard disk as a backing store. What you get is a Persistent Operating System. You don't need a file system. Instead, you store data structures in main memory, and they persist forever, surviving reboots.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
(to diverge ever so slightly)
"Bioinformatics is the dot-com boom all over again..."
I think not.
There is quite a market for bioinformatics. My employer spends around 5 billion USD a year on pharma R+D. Much of that money is used in traditional "brute-force" type attacks of screening many compounds against many targets.
There is tremendous potential for savings through bioinformatics, and the evidence is working its way through pharma pipelines as we speak.
While there may be as much hype around bioinformatics, the field is solving a genuine problem for a mature, well-funded industry, unlike the dot-com book which speclated on products many didn't want with money that didn't exist.
So can we expect them to design a new type of system that has non-volatile memory and vast storage in a similar array, divvied up on the fly by the system depending on whether it needs storage or memory at the moment? I've been waiting for the day when memory and hard drive became one, and this seems to take that one step closer to the inevitable.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
That's the way PalmOS computers work today. There is no difference between your short-term storage and your long-term storage. That's why, with a Palm application, when you enter an event or click a checkbox, you don't have to "save" the results, because it's all in the same memory area.