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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.
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.
Heh
-- Dan
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
None on EBay yet...
Well, looks like I'll have to wait a few weeks.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Please tell me that cray.com isn't slashdotted. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
anyone else find it hilarious that the site is slashdotted?
:)
I know its probably hosted by someone else but come on just the idea that we slashdotted a cray is awesome
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
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
Anyone find this comment from the release kind of ironic?
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.
yum!
It might use a technology known as MEMS which is probe based storage. Probe-based storage system supports probe-based reading and writing of bits, is based on non-rotating media and initially
expected to support storage densities on the order of 100 to 300 Gbit/inch2. The storage
devices are envisioned as two rectangular sleds, one with storage media and the other
with a sparse array of very small read-write heads, in the range of thousands to millions.
Seeks will require x and y motion of one of the sleds relative to the other. These devices
are intrinsically highly parallel because some or all of the heads will be able to operate
simultaneously. [MEMS Modeling]
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?
I can hear it now...
/.: "What kind of server do you run?"
C: The new super duper Cray with the new 224 gig storage system moving data around at 80GB!!
/.: "Whats your connection to the net like?"
C: 256kb DSL line, why?
/.: "...."
But can it run Windows fast?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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...
Library of congress is that...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"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?
So, is the 80GB/s aggregate access for the (n) processors in the box? It's a Solid State Disk -- In other words, it's memory. And, it's not _that_ fast for a shared memory architecture system. see: STREAM Memory benchmarks
How much is it, and can I get it as birthday present?
Maybe they should come up with super duper Tivo box? That would be cool...
Think media streaming server. Compaq and Sun are already building these, but it sounds like Cray might beat them easily, if they bother to build one.
i bet they just use more parralel data buses, hard drives, whatever.
hell, I can fill up 224 gigs - people actually doing useful things with it certainly will be able to.
sic transit gloria mundi
I can transmit my whole genome in a few seconds, While the silicone guys find ways of speeding this benchmark up, I'm looking for ways of slowing it down.
The CPU gets stuff from the cache.
The cache gets stuff from the RAM.
The RAM gets stuff from the hard drive.
The solid state machine won't act like faster memory, making cache misses cost less. It will act like a faster hard drive, making page faults cost less. Using this stuff as a substitute for RAM will slow down your computer unless you have it hard-wired into your system's bus in place of RAM.
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.
That's the beauty of the new HGPS (Human Genome Per Second) unit of measure - there isn't actually a "size" for the genome, since the "genome" as such is a very vague concept, when it comes to actual computer data. So if it's anywhere between 100MB and 500GB it still qualifies.
sic transit gloria mundi
Ok, if we're going to measure capacity in terms of Human Genomes, I want to know how many Jelly Donut Units per hour it takes to power this thing.
"From the intensity of the flame we can deduce that this was a particularly delicious donut."
I've looked all through the Cray website, and I can't find the online order form. How am I going to get one of these systems FedEx'd to me now?
The siliCONE guys might help to shave a couple seconds off your time. It's the siliCON guys who do the computer thing.
Because that's who they're marketing it to - the bioinformatics crowd. Try to forget that there is little-to-no evidence that there's actually a market for all this genome-crunching that's going on.
Or that there are real questions about the quality of the sequencing that's been done, not to mention the (abysmal) quality of the code being written to analyze the sequences.
Bioinformatics is the dot-com boom all over again...
-Mark
95,791 whole songs available instantly.
Ad slogan: "The new iCray. 95,791 songs. In half your basement."
Methinks were being jipped...
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.
Each base pair only needs 2 bits to represent it (there are only 4 bases). Based on the genome-munging code I've seen, though, it's very common to represent genome sequences with one byte per base pair, like so:
"CGAAGAACGAT"
A little comp. sci. 101 would be a good investment for some of these people, I think.
-Mark
You wouldn't put them into a beowulf cluster anymore than you would put hard drives into a beowulf cluster. RAID is what you want, but really, a RAID array of these things would be pretty rediculous. :-)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
"System Can Transfer 100 Copies of Human Genome Per Second"
Big deal, I can transfer O( 1e6 ) half-copies of the human genome in less than five minutes.
The announcement was pretty thin on technical details. What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters? That title implies not, to me. Exactly what technology allows 224G of storage in non-platter form? Is this an actual commercial implementation of the crystal holography gunk and other amazing "future" stuff?
It sure would be interesting to know if this is a real advance, or just a big disk.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
224GB is quite a bit for a solid state storage device--look at the Quantum Rushmore drives. Their capacities are in the single digit GB.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
It seems to me that many people here have no idea what a true supercomputer (or more specifically, a Cray) is or what makes it different from a simple cluster. Here's a few things to think about:
- Crays do not have monitors. They do not have keyboards, or mice.
- Crays do not run Windows. Crays do not run Linux. Crays usually run UNICOS, a special *nix designed specifically for Crays.
- Crays communicate with the outside world through a host terminal, like a SGI workstation, or something similar to that. Crays DON'T HAVE CD-ROM DRIVES!
- Nobody but those with 8-9 figure incomes get to buy a Cray. They cost MILLIONS, and the higher end ones can cost many many tens of millions.
- Pretty much the type of people that WOULD buy a Cray would be the government, and very very large corporations. Sorry, guys.
- Simply connecting 30 PCs together in a cluster will result in a nice, fast supercluster, but it won't come close to a Cray, because Crays are designed from the beginning to be as parallel as possible. Face it: beowulf clusters really can't make the best use of the contained hardware because the hardware wasn't designed to be so distributed.
- Be impressed with Crays. Be very impressed.
-James
(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.
"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...
But I'm picking up to after work!
/dies
I'm not sure what happened, but my coworker just screamed "the price" and died in his cubicle?
We had this discussion on slashdot back in the day and it seems to be a trend. The fact is that with all the progress made in computing technology, those spinning platters and movable arms have been the bottleneck for some time.
--Jon
A few racks of 1U servers could be configured to have that much DRAM.
Bastian: I don't knooooowwWWWWWW, AAAHHhhhhhh! Bastian is trown from the clif by an an invisible hand.
Those struck by lightening and survive fear tingling sensations.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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.
What the heck kind of bus do the expect to drop this wad of data onto? Or are they planning to just map it directly into some memory array? Something like this could change a lot of software - having offline storage faster than main memory is a big deal for many algorithms. The implications are huge! When can I get one and how many lotteries do I need to win?
How, exactly, is this offtopic? It's a storage system, storage systems are used in file servers.
Sheesh, getting an offtopic moderation for an on-topic post in response to a story that I was the submitter for.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
right... because Cray is relying on the viewership of *Alias* to boost their sales.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
It's only a fraction of the RAM size of an average supercomputer. No wonder Cray isn't at the top of supercomputing anymore, it's basically a reseller nowadays.
About 10 years ago I read about a solid state device called a "holostore" that was in the prototype stage. It consisted of crystalline cylinders about a millimeter or so in diameter and 5 or 10 mm long, standing next to each other in a 50x50 array. Data was stored and read optically by three laser beams aimed at different angles polarizing the molecules, same principle as an LCD. I forget the total capacity but the transfer rate figure of 8 or 80Gb/second seems familiar. The prototype was said to have the same form factor as a 5-1/4-inch floppy drive, and like everything else it was supposed to be on the market in 2 or 3 years.
Another variant of Moore's law (of who I forget stated it) says that a balanced supercomputer is "bytes == flops", that is it must be able to process as many bytes of data PER SECOND as it can do floating point operations. This has often meant that core memory must be about the same number of bytes as there are flops. This device goes a long way in satisfying this requirement.
Early super computers in a generation sometimes skimp on such memory and are only good for problems that dont require much I/O like some physics simulations. Anything that processes data such as satellite imagery or seismic, weather, etc. requires significant memory capacity..