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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.
Heh
-- Dan
yeah, and computers are just arrangements of existing silicon, copper, aluminum....
None on EBay yet...
Well, looks like I'll have to wait a few weeks.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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
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?
/.: "...."
and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second.
....
Yeah but then so can a fully laden school bus
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?
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...
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.
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.
The siliCONE guys might help to shave a couple seconds off your time. It's the siliCON guys who do the computer thing.
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.
"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.
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
>What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters?
:).
No moving parts, you can look at this like a "big ram disk" exept it has it's interface like another storage device. Look at this like A compactflash for example (it's not "SSD" but it's a good comparison.
There are a lot of interfaces (PCI, ATA, SCSI, proprietary (80GB/sec is either a big aggregated pile of raids or something similar) for these "drives" at various price points. The advantage of a SSD drive on a PC is that you have instant access, and it moves the stuff at a lightning speed limited only by your bus. Let's say you run a SSD drive on a Ultra160 interface, what you'd probably see with a disk benchmarking tool is 100nS access time (versus ~10ms for a standard drive) and you could see the real-world numbers of your scsi bus, probably around 140MB/sec (didn't try one on a U160 bus). The application for these babies are numerous: instant access to data on boards that don't handle 100GB of ram to cache everything or you wanting the machine to preload 1 hour at every reboot, bandwidth hungry application (although a raid could do the same here, but I saw some specific application needed both the bandwidth and under 1ms access time needed so..), for heavy swapping of numbers without using a buttload of ram again, etc.. probably some other people could think of something other. Usually when you break a certain amount of GB, the drives becomes cheaper than a motherboard that could handle a load of ram and the ram modules themselves, so it makes more sense if $$ is a factor (but still it's very expensive, we're talking 10K+ easily for a few GB).
There's also plenty of product on the net (search google), like I said, some are PCI cards that you add to your system with PC100 ram on it, some are IDE/SCSI, etc.. But for home people, you'd be better off with a cheap IDE raid card and a few drives, it's way cheaper
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
(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.
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.
Not really - consider SGI's servers, for instance. The Origin 3800 can handle 1 TB of RAM -- but it's a CC-NUMA machine, meaning you have to go through an intermediate router (don't think Internet; much faster) to get to the memory. SGI machines have a limit of 8GB per processor "brick", and their bricks interconnect at 1.6 or 1.2GB/s.
Then consider the SunFire 15K - it's an SMP machine; processors fit on boards that can contain up to 32GB of RAM; after that, you have to go off-board through a switch to get to other memory. Each system board has about 9.6GB/s of offboard memory access speed.
In short, Cray isn't tooting needlessly - this is impressive bandwidth to the memory. Latency is probably fairly high on it, but for streaming vast quantities of data in and out of local storage, it's probably amazingly nice.