• Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

    May 6, 2017

    Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

    Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

    In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

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  • Squeezing The Joules Out Of DRAM, Possibly Without Stacking

    March 23, 2017

    Increasing parallelism is the only way to get more work out of a system. Architecting for that parallelism required requires a lot of rethinking of each and every component in a system to make everything hum along as efficiently as possible.

    There are lots of ways to skin the parallelism cats and squeeze more performance and less energy out of the system, and for DRAM memory, just stacking things up helps, but according to some research done at Stanford University, the University of Texas, and GPU maker Nvidia, there is another way to boost performance and lower energy consumption. The …

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  • Systems To Morph As Memory Options Expand

    June 11, 2016

    Compute is by far still the largest part of the hardware budget at most IT organizations, and even with the advance of technology, which allows more compute, memory, storage, and I/O to be crammed into a server node, we still seem to always want more. But with a tighter coupling of flash in systems and new memories coming to market like 3D XPoint, the server is set to become a more complex bit of machinery.

    To try to figure out what is going on out there with memory on systems in the real world and how future technologies might affect …

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  • Future Systems: What Will Tomorrow’s Server Look Like?

    February 4, 2016

    We can talk about storage and networking as much as we want, and about how the gravity of data bends infrastructure to its needs, but the server – or a collection of them loosely or tightly coupled – is still the real center of the datacenter.

    Data is useless unless you process it, after all. As more than a few companies that have built data lakes as a knee jerk reaction have come to realize.

    The server is where organizations spend the bulk of their budgets when they build platforms – excepting, of course, the vast sums they lavish on …

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  • There Is No Such Thing As Memory Performance

    October 5, 2015

    Petar Radokjovic, who leads the memory systems division at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, described his desk, messy with the latest research on next-generation memory systems for high performance computing, and says that for a time, the sight of them was enough to give him an ulcer.

    Specifically, it has been the relatively recent string of published research (not to mention a wave of vendor material) espousing the tremendous “memory performance gains” that will come from the emerging series of stacked memory technologies, including the Hybrid Memory Cube and High Bandwidth Memory. It’s not that these are not potentially game-changing technologies, …

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  • The Nitty Gritty Of In Memory Computing

    September 7, 2015 Mark Funk

    As noted at the beginning of this article series last week, an initial dive into in-memory computing meant questioning whether this was just another of those buzz words or whether there was some meat behind it. The meat might not be particularly fresh, but it seems that the way it is being prepared really is something new and novel.

    We largely just need to agree on what all we are talking about when considering its use. Let’s start with column stores. Suppose that you have a massive database of customer information from throughout the world. But now you want to …

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  • Intel Reveals Plans For Optane 3D XPoint Memory

    August 18, 2015

    Chip makers and partners Intel and Micron Technology unveiled their jointly developed and manufactured 3D XPoint memory three weeks ago to much fanfare, but it is still perhaps sinking in to system architects and future system buyers how dramatic a move this is and how much it will change the memory hierarchy in systems and the applications that ride on it.

    Both companies have been very tight lipped about the change in the bulk material processes that will be used to create 3D XPoint memory, which can split the difference between volatile DRAM memory and non-volatile NAND flash memory in …

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  • Flash Disruption Comes To Server Main Memory

    August 5, 2015

    Flash memory is cheap, but it isn’t fast, at least not by the standards of DRAM. But Diablo Technologies, an upstart in the memory arena that has been making some waves in recent years, thinks that putting NAND flash into server main memory slots and actually addressing it, at the bit level like memory and not at the block level like regular NAND flash, is going to be extremely disruptive. Much more so than the Memory Channel Storage that Diablo co-developed with SanDisk and IBM, and possibly as disruptive as the 3D XPoint memory from Intel and Micron Technology that …

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  • Building New Bridges Across the Memory Gap

    April 13, 2015

    There is little doubt that the memory ecosystem will heat up over the next five to ten years, with emerging technologies still in development that promise massive bandwidth, capacity, and price advancements. But in the nearer term, as the demands of data add further weight in terms of the above elements—not to mention reliability, energy efficiency, and lowered costs – there is a driving need to improve technologies that are already in the market.

    It’s simple to talk about mere memory capacity and bandwidth using hard numbers, but there are other problems that signal a troubled future for memory technology …

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