• Raising The Standard For Storage Memory Fabrics

    October 12, 2016

    People tend to obsess about processing when it comes to system design, but ultimately an application and its data lives in memory and anything that can improve the capacity, throughput, and latency of memory will make all the processing you throw at it result in useful work rather than wasted clock cycles.

    This is why flash has been such a boon for systems. But we can do better, and the Gen-Z consortium announced this week is going to create a new memory fabric standard that it hopes will break down the barriers between main memory and other storage-class memories on …

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  • Weaving Accelerators Into The Memory Complex

    July 14, 2016 Mark Funk

    In the first part of this series on the proposed Cache Coherence Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) standard, we talked about the issues of cache coherence and the need to share memory across various kinds of compute elements in a system. In this second part, we will go deeper into the approach of providing memory coherence across CPUs and various kinds of accelerators that have their own local memory.

    A local accelerator could potentially be anything. You want something to execute faster than what is possible in today’s generic processors, and so you throw specialized hardware at the problem. Still, …

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  • Drilling Into The CCIX Coherence Standard

    July 13, 2016 Mark Funk

    The past decade or so has seen some really phenomenal capacity growth and similarly remarkable software technology in support of distributed-memory systems.  When work can be spread out across a lot of processors and/or a lot of disjointed memory, life has been good.

    Pity, though, that poor application needing access to a lot of shared memory or which could use the specialized and so faster resources of local accelerators. For such, distributed memory just does not cut it and having to send work out to an IO-attached accelerator chews into much of what would otherwise be an accelerator’s advantages. With …

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