New Network Design Exploits Cheap, Power-Efficient Flash Memory

jan_jes writes: The researchers at MIT were able to make a network of flash-based servers competitive with a network of RAM-based servers by moving a little computational power off of the servers and onto the chips that control the flash drives. Each server connected to a FPGA and each FPGA, in turn, was connected to flash chips and to the two FPGAs nearest it in the server rack. As it is connected to each other, they created a very fast network that allowed any server to retrieve data from any flash drive. Finally, the FPGAs executed the algorithms that preprocessed the data stored on the flash drives.

Comments

WOW! IBM Tech from the 80's have been discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back and look at an AS/400, iSeries, i5 and now called IBM i,

Biggest machine I worked on, 32 cores and 3/4TB of ram. And that was still ovly 1/2 as big it could be. But that 3/4TB was not the total ram in the machine, it had IOPs and IOAs that oversaw the the disk drives. Those processors had large ram and were basically fast and faster cache. So our machine with 900 drives in multiple raid-6 groupings (IOPs) with multi-grouping in IOA, acted as a 900 drive raid-0 (stripe) to main core. So reading a file sequencially all the drives will start suppling data first data in 50ms... but then the rest was "just there". Processing 4 billion row history files was easy.

Re:Very similar to the EMC Isilon...

[gstoddart]

Big slow cheap with low power consumption;

Flash memory -- the type of memory used by most portable devices -- could provide an alternative to conventional RAM for big-data applications. It's about a tenth as expensive, and it consumes about a tenth as much power.

The problem is that it's also a tenth as fast. But at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June, MIT researchers presented a new system that, for several common big-data applications, should make servers using flash memory as efficient as those using conventional RAM, while preserving their power and cost savings.

The researchers also presented experimental evidence showing that, if the servers executing a distributed computation have to go to disk for data even 5 percent of the time, their performance falls to a level that's comparable with flash, anyway.

So, power saving, good performance, and cheaper.

The world hasn't changed, but for a specific kind of problem, this is kind of interesting. This sounds like they've made huge scale computing cheaper for some classes of problem.

I bet the people who solve those problems will care.

Re:FPGA is just gimmicked flash

[Dutch Gun]

I don't understand why you equate digital logic to non-volatile memory arrays.

You're simply underestimating the propensity of some people to proudly display their ignorance to the world.

Re:FPGA is just gimmicked flash

[squiggleslash]

This comment reminded me a little of this Wondermark comic.

Seymour Cray, call your office

[eric_harris_76]

Moving some processing out of the central processor and into processors that access storage is not exactly new.

But I bet these servers don't look too terribly much like CDC 6000s. (Especially their FPGA parts.)

The article should be an interesting read. Which I will get to soon, now that I've offered an uninformed opinion about TFA and incidentally exposed my geezerhood.