Last month’s SNIA Persistent Memory and Computational Storage Summit (PM+CS Summit) put on a great show with 35 technology presentations from 41 speakers. Every presentation is now available online with a video and PDF found at www.snia.org/pm-summit.
Recently, SNIA On Storage sat down with David McIntyre, Summit Chair from Samsung, on his impressions of this 10th annual event.
SNIA On Storage (SOS): What were your thoughts on key topics coming into the Summit and did they change based on the presentations?
David McIntyre (DM): We were excited to attract technology leaders to speak on the state of computational storage and persistent memory. Both mainstage and breakout speakers did a good job of encapsulating and summarizing what is happening today. Through the different talks, we learned more about infrastructure deployments supporting underlying applications and use cases. A new area where attendees gained insight was computational memory.
I find it encouraging that as an industry we are moving forward on focusing on applications and use cases, and supporting software and infrastructure that resides across persistent memory and computational storage. And with computational memory, we are now getting more into the system infrastructure concerns and making these technologies more accessible to application developers.
SOS: Any sessions you want to recommend to viewers?
DM: We had great feedback on our speakers during the live event. Several sessions I might recommend are Gary Grider of Los Alamos National Labs (LANL), who explained how computational storage is being deployed across his lab; Chris Petersen of Meta, who took an infrastructure view on considerations for persistent memory and computational storage; and Andy Walls of IBM, who presented a nice viewpoint of his vision of computational storage and its underlying benefits that make the overall infrastructure more rich and efficient, and how to bring compute to the drives. For a summary, watch Dave Eggleston of In-Cog Computing who led Tuesday and Wednesday panels with the mainstage speakers that provided a wide ranging discussion on the Summit’s key topics.
SOS: What do you see as the top takeaways from the Summit presenters?
DM: I see three:
- Infrastructure, applications, and use cases were paramount themes across a number of presentations
- Tighter coupling of technologies. Cheolmin Park of Samsung, in his CXL and UCIe presentation, discussed how we already have point technologies that now need to interact together. There is also the Persistent Memory/SSD/DRAM combination – a tiered memory configuration talked about for years. We are seeing deployment use cases where the glue is interfacing the I/O technology with CXL and UCIe.
- Another takeaway strongly related to the above is heterogeneous operations and compute. Compute can’t reside in one central location for efficiency. Rather, it must be distributed – addressing real-time analytics and decision making to support applications.
SOS: What upcoming activities should Summit viewers plan to attend and why?
DM: Put Flash Memory Summit, August 1-4, 2022 on your calendars. Here SNIA will go deeper into areas we explored at the Summit.
First, join SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative (CMSI), underwriter of the PM+CS Summit, as we meet in person for the first time in a long time at the SNIA Reception on Monday evening August 1 at the Santa Clara Convention Center from 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm. Along with our SNIA teammates from the SNIA Storage Management Initiative, network with colleagues and share an appetizer or two as we gear up for three full days of activities.
At the Summit, the SNIA-sponsored System Architectures Track will feature a day on persistent memory, a day on CXL, and a day on computational storage. SNIA will also lead sessions on form factors, ethernet SSDs, sustainability, and DNA data storage. I am Track Manager of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Track, where we will see how technologies like computational storage and AI work hand-in-hand.
SNIA will have a Demonstration Pavilion at booth 725 in the FMS Exhibit Hall with live demonstrations of computational storage applications, persistent memory implementations, and scalable storage management with SNIA Alliance Partners; hands-on form factor displays; a Persistent Memory Programming Workshop and Hackathon; and theater presentations on standards. Full details are at www.flashmemorysummit.com
In September, CMSI will be at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference where we will celebrate SNIA’s 25th anniversary and gather in person for sessions, demonstrations, and those ever popular Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. Find the latest details at www.storagedeveloper.org.
SOS: Any final thoughts?
DM: On behalf of SNIA CMSI and the PM+CS Summit Planning Team, I’d like to thank all those who planned and attended our great event. We are progressing in the right direction, beginning to talk the same language that application developers and solution providers understand. We’ll keep building our strategic collaboration across different worlds at FMS and SDC. I appreciate the challenges and working together.