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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.

20 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. Hardware review by mESSDan · · Score: 5, Funny
    C'mon, where are the obligatory Quake3/UT FPS statistics? I want to know if I'm going to get 1,000,045 FPS or 1,000,0053 FPS. Don't they read Tom's Hardware?

    Heh

    --

    -- Dan
    1. Re:Hardware review by realdpk · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah, and if it was on Tom's Hardware, they'd include some practically useless commentary on how it is 5% faster if you overclock it. Woo hoo!

      :)

      (on that note, is there a hardware site out there that does not have this bizarre overclocking "bent"?)

  2. Re:Super storage, super price. by doooras · · Score: 5, Funny

    yeah, and computers are just arrangements of existing silicon, copper, aluminum....

  3. /.'ed by BlackSol · · Score: 4, Funny

    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 =~ /idea\s+(.*)/i);
  4. 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
  5. Re:PThe press Release.... by billstr78 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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]

  6. 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?

    1. Re:New Measurement System? by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Informative
      Just out of curiosity, how many copies of the human genome would anyone currently be trying to store on one computer at this time?

      A whole bunch. One of the difficulties of sequencing the genome is that it's somewhat error prone, which requires that the same region be sequenced several times to make sure that you've gotten it right. The chunks that can be sequenced conveniently are also very small compared to the whole thing, so it's necessary to sequence in overlapping chunks and put it together like a puzzle. The combination of those things means that each base in the genome must be sequenced something like 10 times to get a reliable result. That gets you up to 10 genomes off the bat. Add in the fact that each bit of sequencing information will have meta-data (i.e. where that snippet came from, which machine generated it and when, etc.) associated with it and things fluff up even more. When you start piecing the data together it will require a lot of processing power, so it may wind up being a good idea to use algorithms that trade storage space for processing time, and that can inflate your storage needs even more.

      Even once you have the genome as a finished product, you may very well want to have more than one genome available. An important, but less well publicised, part of the genome project was the decision to sequence the complete genomes of several other organisms at the same time. Those include four species particularly popular among biologists: the mouse, the fruit fly, a round worm used in a lot of research, and baker's yeast. Doing genome to genome comparisons is a very good way of finding the areas that are biologically important because they'll remain similar across organisms. As you can imagine, doing a complete chunk by chunk comparison between two 3 GB data sets can chew up a lot of resources, and having fast access to a huge memory space like that is going to make it a lot easier and faster.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  7. Re:slashdot effect by myz24 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

    /.: "...."

  8. Re:Transfers more than it can store... by taniwha · · Score: 4, Funny

    and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second.

    Yeah but then so can a fully laden school bus ....

  9. So, how many by geekoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    Library of congress is that...

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  10. Re:Extra storage? by glwtta · · Score: 5, Funny

    hell, I can fill up 224 gigs - people actually doing useful things with it certainly will be able to.

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi
  11. Transferring my genome by Joel+Ironstone · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Transferring my genome by Aceticon · · Score: 5, Funny

      The "natural" way of transmiting the human genome (at least for half the human beings) is high speed but also high latency - it takes a while to start it up (how much depends on the individual) but when it starts it's a burst of genomic information.

      Strangely enough it's all contained on packets with a size of 1/2 human genome...

  12. ummm. . . no by Bastian · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. Marketroid sense is tingling by Bastian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  14. Actually... by Chazmati · · Score: 4, Funny

    The siliCONE guys might help to shave a couple seconds off your time. It's the siliCON guys who do the computer thing.

  15. It seems to me by compupc1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  16. -OT- usefulness of bioinformatics by jonbrewer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (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.

  17. Re:Because they need it ! by angio · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.