On 05/01/2014 05:35 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
On 05/01/2014 05:07 PM, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:
On 05/01/2014 03:57 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
On 05/01/2014 03:43 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
On 05/01/2014 03:33 PM, atchley tds.net wrote:
Yes, but I don't want to buy a Dell just to get a NVMe unit. ;-)
Not that I am trying to get the dude a Dell ... but think of it as
very expensive shrink wrap packaging ... :^
On the bright side, a Dell box will be easier to open than a plastic
clam-shell package.
Dell is the only one shipping the Samsung XS1715 to the best of my
knowledge. Please correct me if there is some other place which is.
Samsung's the only one on the market with anything providing NVMe
right now. Should change within the year though.
But, as a word of caution, let's all beat this into our heads now:
Flash is not RAM. Flash is not RAM. Flash is not RAM. Not even slow
RAM. (Ok, NAND Flash is not slow RAM -- maybe you could get away with
saying NOR flash is slow RAM). If it ain't byte-addressable, it ain't
RAM.
Despite being the one who stated us down the NVMe path, I get this
I wasn't suggesting NVMe was inherently a bad direction to go. I just
always feel compelled to provide these warnings, as I did with you when
we talked last. There is a lot of pressure in academia to just find a
way to make NAND act like RAM, and its a giant square hole round peg
situation. People are incredibly resistant when I suggest to them that
maybe we should stop thinking about computing as black and white "main
memory" and "persistent storage." I.e., maybe there is something
in-between, and we need to give it first-class citizenship, rethink how
systems should leverage that, and actually build it in rather than just
write papers about it.
warning. How does UltraDIMM work, then? Have they found a way to
byte-address flash RAM, or are they using some sort of translation layer
Buffers on buffers, as I expected. Hide the real NAND access patterns
behind bunches of RAM. Per:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/162944-diablos-memory-channel-storage-tech-will-deliver-terabytes-of-ram-using-nand-flash
"Even the fastest NAND flash is far behind conventional DRAM as far as
read/write speeds are concerned — how does Memory Channel Storage get
around that?
Through the intelligent use of buffers. Here, Diablo Technologies was
cagey and clearly didn’t want to give too much away, but it told us that
each TeraDIMM contains a DRAM buffer of unspecified size. The company’s
patent filings confirm this, and imply that the amount of RAM per DIMM
can vary depending on the wishes of the manufacturer. Stacking
additional RAM on the TeraDIMM allows the controller to mask access
latencies and perform write cycles in the background."
If you've got uniformly random tiny writes going across the entire
space, which RAM wouldn't care about and where RAM shines compared to
everything else, UltraDIMM et. al. are going to look fast for a bit and
then jump off a performance cliff -- because it catches up with them.
as a kludge? As I understand it, you could put it in a regular DIMM
slot, but I could be wrong about that.
It does go in a regular DIMM slot. But yes, kludge, hammers, the works.
Still damn fast if you use it intelligently, but don't expect it to
just jump into RAM's place and work great.
Best,
ellis
--
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University
www.ellisv3.com
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