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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.

8 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
  2. Re:Super storage, super price. by doooras · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. 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
  4. 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...

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.