SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Summit is where solutions, architectures, and community come together. Our 2024 Summit – taking place virtually on May 21-22, 2024 – is the best example to date, featuring a stellar lineup of 30 speakers in sessions on artificial intelligence, the future of memory, sustainability, critical storage security issues, the latest on CXL®, UCIe™, and Ultra Ethernet, and more.
“We’re excited to welcome executives, architects, developers, implementers, and users to our 12th annual Summit,” said David McIntyre, Compute, Memory, and Storage Summit Chair and member of the SNIA Board of Directors. “Our event features technology leaders from companies like Dell, IBM, Intel, Meta, Samsung – and many more – to bring us the latest developments in AI, compute, memory, storage, and security in our free online event. We hope you will attend live to ask questions of our experts as they present and watch those you miss on-demand.“
(UEC) on powering AI’s future with the UEC, John Cardente of Dell on storage requirements for AI, Jeff White of Dell on edgenuity, and Garima Desai of Samsung on creating a sustainable semiconductor industry for the AI era. Other AI sessions include Manoj Wadekar of Meta on the evolution of hyperscale data centers from CPU centric to GPU accelerated AI, Paul McLeod of Supermicro on storage architecture optimized for AI, and Prasad Venkatachar of Pliops on generative AI data architecture.
Memory sessions begin with Jim Handy and Tom Coughlin on how memories are driving big architectural changes. Ahmed Medhioub of Astera Labs will discuss breaking through the memory wall with CXL, and Sudhir Balasubramanian and Arvind Jagannath of VMware will share their memory vision for real world applications.
Compute sessions include Andy Walls of IBM on computational storage and real time ransomware detection, JB Baker of ScaleFlux on computational storage real world deployments, Dominic Manno of Los Alamos National Labs on streamlining scientific workflows in computational storage, and Bill Martin and Jason Molgaard of the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group on computational storage standards.
CXL will be featured with a CXL Consortium panel on increasing AI and HPC application performance with CXL fabrics, a presentation from Larrie Carr of Rambus on proprietary internconnects and CXL, and a session from Samsung and Broadcom on bringing unique customer value with CXL accelerator-based memory solutions.
Richelle Ahlvers and Brian Rea of the UCI Express will discuss enabling an open chipset system with UCIe.
The Summit will also dive into security with a number of presentations on this important topic.
And there is much more, including a memory Birds-of-a-Feather session, a live Memory Workshop and Hackathon featuring CXL exercises, and opportunities to chat with our experts! Check out the agenda and register for free!
2023 was a great year for SNIA CMSI to meet with IT professionals and end users in “Summits” to discuss technologies, innovations, challenges, and solutions. Our outreach at six industry events reached over 16,000 and we thank all who engaged with our CMSI members.
We are excited to continue a second “Year of the Summit” with a variety of opportunities to network and converse with you. Our first networking event will take place March 26-27, 2024 at MemCon in Mountain View, CA.
MemCon 2024 focuses on systems design for the data centric era, working with data-intensive workloads, integrating emerging technologies, and overcoming data movement and management challenges. The agenda includes presentations and panels, featuring speakers from Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Samsung, and Warner Brothers. It’s the perfect event to discuss the integration of SNIA’s focus on developing global standards and delivering education on all technologies related to data. SNIA and MemCon have prepared a video highlighting several of the key topics to be discussed.
MemCon 2024 Video Preview
At MemCon, SNIA CMSI member and SDXI Technical Work Group Chair Shyam Iyer of Dell will moderate a panel discussion on How are Memory Innovations Impacting the Total Cost of Ownership in Scaling-Up and Power Consumption , discussing impacts on hyperscalers, AI/ML compute, and cost/power.
SNIA Board member David McIntyre will participate in a panel on How are Increased Adoption of CXL, HBM, and Memory Protocol Expected to Change the Way Memory and Storage is Used and Assembled? , with insights on the markets and emerging memory innovations. The full MemCon agenda is here.
In the exhibit area, SNIA leaders will be on hand to demonstrate updates to the SNIA Persistent Memory Programming Workshop featuring new CXL® memory modules (get an early look at our Programming exercises here) and to provide a first look at a Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) specification implementation. We’ll also provide updates on SNIA technical work on form factors like those used for CXL. We will feature a drawing for gift cards at the SNIA hosted coffee receptions and at the Tuesday evening networking reception.
SNIA colleagues and friends can register for MemCon with a 15% discount using code SNIA15.
And stay tuned for engaging with SNIA at upcoming events in 2024, including a return of the SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Summit in May 2024, August 2024 FMS-the Future of Memory and Storage; SNIA SDC in September, and SC24 in Atlanta in November 2024. We’ll discuss each of these in depth in our Year of the Summit blog series.
CXL will discuss their advances in coherent connectivity. PCI-SIG will feature their PCIe 5.0 architecture (32GT/s) and PCIe 6.0 (65GT/s) architectures and industry adoption and the upcoming PCIe 7.0 specification development (128GT/s). UCIe will discuss their new open industry standard establishing a universal interconnect at the package-level.
SNIA STA Forum will also be in Booth #849 – learn more about the SCSI Trade Association joining SNIA.
These demonstrations and discussions will augment FMS program sessions in the SNIA-sponsored System Architecture Track on memory, computational storage, CXL, and UCIe standards. A SNIA mainstage session on Wednesday August 9 at 2:10 pm will discuss Trends in Storage and Data: New Directions for Industry Standards.
SNIA colleagues and friends can receive a $100 discount off the 1-, 2-, or 3-day full conference registration by using code SNIA23.
Visit snia.org/fms to learn more about the exciting activities at FMS 2023 and join us there!
It seems like an easy enough question, “What is an SSD?” but surprisingly, most of the search results for this get somewhat confused quickly on media, controllers, form factors, storage interfaces, performance, reliability, and different market segments.
The SNIA SSD SIG has spent time demystifying various SSD topics like endurance, form factors, and the different classifications of SSDs – from consumer to enterprise and hyperscale SSDs.
“Solid state drive is a general term that covers many market segments, and the SNIA SSD SIG has developed a new overview of “What is an SSD? ,” said Jonmichael Hands, SNIA SSD Special Interest Group (SIG)Co-Chair. “We are committed to helping make storage technology topics, like endurance and form factors, much easier to understand coming straight from the industry experts defining the specifications.”
The “What is an SSD?” page offers a concise description of what SSDs do, how they perform, how they connect, and also provides a jumping off point for more in-depth clarification of the many aspects of SSDs. It joins an ever-growing category of 20 one-page “What Is?” answers that provide a clear and concise, vendor-neutral definition of often- asked technology terms, a description of what they are, and how each of these technologies work. Check out all the “What Is?” entries at https://www.snia.org/education/what-is
SNIA’s Compute+Memory+Storage Summit is where architectures, solutions, and community come together. Our 2023 Summit – taking place virtually on April 11-12, 2023– is the best example to date, featuring a stellar lineup of 50 speakers in 40 sessions covering topics including computational storage real-world applications, the future of memory, critical storage security issues, and the latest on SSD form factors, CXL™, and UCIe™.
“We’re excited to welcome executives, architects, developers, implementers, and users to our 11th annual Summit,” said David McIntyre, C+M+S Summit Co-Chair, and member of the SNIA Board of Directors. “We’ve gathered the technology leaders to bring us the latest developments in compute, memory, storage, and security in our free online event. We hope you will watch live to ask questions of our experts as they present, and check out those sessions you miss on-demand.”
Memory sessions begin with Watch Out – Memory’s Changing! where Jim Handy and Tom Coughlin will discuss the memory technologies vying for the designer’s attention, with CXL™ and UCIe™ poised to completely change the rules. Speakers will also cover thinking memory, optimizing memory using simulations, providing capacity and TCO to applications using software memory tiering, and fabric attached memory.
Compute sessions include Steven Yuan of StorageX discussing the Efficiency of Data Centric Computing, and presentations on the computational storage and compute market, big-disk computational storage arrays for data analytics, NVMe as a cloud interface, improving storage systems for simulation science with computational storage, and updates on SNIA and NVM Express work on computational storage standards.
CXL and UCIe will be featured with presentations on CXL 3.0 and Universal Compute Interface Express™ On-Package Innovation Slot for Compute, Memory, and Storage Applications.
The Summit will also dive into security with a introductory view of today’s storage security landscape and additional sessions on zero trust architecture, storage sanitization, encryption, and cyber recovery and resilience.
For 2023, the Summit is delighted to present three panels – one on Exploring the Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) Device Ecosystem and Usage Models moderated by Kurtis Bowman of the CXL Consortium, one on Persistent Memory Trends moderated by Dave Eggleston of Microchip, and one on Form Factor Updates, moderated by Cameron Brett of the SNIA SSD Special Interest Group.
We will also feature the popular SNIA Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. On Tuesday April 11 at 4:00 pm PDT/7:00 pm EDT, you can join to discuss the latest compute, memory, and storage developments, and on Wednesday April at 3:00 pm PDT/6:00 pm EDT, we’ll be talking about memory advances.
For 11 years, SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI) has presented a Summit featuring industry leaders speaking on the key topics of the day. In the early years, it was persistent memory-focused, educating audiences on the benefits and uses of persistent memory. In 2020 it expanded to a Persistent Memory+Computational Storage Summit, examining that new technology, its architecture, and use cases.
Now in 2023, the Summit is expanding again to focus on compute, memory, and storage. In fact, we’re calling 2023 the Year of the Summit – a year to get back to meeting in person and offering a variety of ways to listen to leaders, learn about technology, and network to discuss innovations, challenges, solutions, and futures.
We’re delighted that our first event of the Year of the Summit is a networking event at MemCon, taking place March 28-29 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA.
At MemCon, SNIA CMSI member and IEEE President elect Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates will moderate a panel discussion on Compute, Memory, and Storage Technology Trends for the Application Developer. Panel members Debendra Das Sharma of Intel and the CXL™ Consortium, David McIntyre of Samsung and the SNIA Board of Directors, Arthur Sainio of SMART Modular and the SNIA Persistent Memory Special Interest Group, and Arvind Jaganath of VMware and SNIA CMSI will examine how applications and solutions available today offer ways to address enterprise and cloud provider challenges – and they’ll provide a look to the future.
SNIA leaders will be on hand to discuss work in computational storage, smart data acceleration interface (SDXI), SSD form factor advances, and persistent memory trends. Share a libation or two at the SNIA hosted networking reception on Tuesday evening, March 28.
This inaugural MemCon event is perfect to start the conversation, as it focuses on the intersection between systems design, memory innovation (emerging memories, storage & CXL) and other enabling technologies. SNIA colleagues and friends can register for MemCon with a 15% discount using code SNIA15.
April 2023 Networking!
We will continue the Year with a newly expanded SNIA Compute+Memory+Storage Summit coming up April 11-12 as a virtual event. Complimentary registration is now open for a stellar lineup of speakers, including Stephen Bates of Huawei, Debendra Das Sharma of Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™, Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, Shyam Iyer of Dell, Bill Martin of Samsung, Jake Oshins of Microsoft, Andy Rudoff of Intel, Andy Walls of IBM, and Steven Yuan of StorageX.
Summit topics include Memory’s Headed for Change, High Performance Data Analytics, CXL 3.0, Detecting Ransomware, Meeting Scaling Challenges, Open Standards for Innovation at the Package Level, and Standardizing Memory to Memory Data Movement. Great panel discussions are on tap as well. Kurt Lender of the CXL Consortium will lead a discussion on Exploring the CXL Device Ecosystem and Usage Models, Dave Eggleston of Microchip will lead a panel with Samsung and SMART Modular on Persistent Memory Trends, and Cameron Brett of KIOXIA will lead a SSD Form Factors Update. More details at www.snia.org/cms-summit.
Version 1.0 of the SNIA Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model has just been released to the public at www.snia.org/csarch. The Model has received industry accolades, winning the Flash Memory Summit 2022 Best of Show Award for Most Innovative Memory Technology at their recent conference. Congratulations to all the companies and individuals who contributed large amounts of expertise and time to the creation of this Model.
SNIAOnStorage sat down with SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group (CS TWG) co-chairs Jason Molgaard and Scott Shadley; SNIA Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model editor Bill Martin; and SNIA Computational Storage Special Interest Group chair David McIntyre to get their perspectives on this milestone release and next steps for SNIA.
SNIAOnStorage (SOS): What is the significance of a 1.0
release for this computational storage SNIA specification?
Bill Martin (BM): The
1.0 designation indicates that the SNIA membership has voted to approve the
SNIA Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model as an official
SNIA specification. This means that our
membership believes that the architecture is something that you can develop
computational storage-related products to where multiple vendor products will
have similar complimentary architectures and with an industry standardized
programming model.
Jason Molgaard (JM): The 1.0 release also indicates a level
of maturity where companies can implement computational storage that reflects
the elements of the Model. The SNIA CS
TWG took products into account when defining the Model’s reference architecture. The Model is for everyone – even those who
were not part of the 52 participating companies and 258 member representatives in
the TWG – this is concrete, and they can begin development today.
SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group Company Members
SOS: What do you think is the most important feature of the 1.0 release?
Scott Shadley (SS):
Because we have reached the 1.0 release, there is no one specific area
that makes one feature more important than anything else. The primary difference from the last release
and 1.0 was addressing the Security section. As we know, there are many new
security discussions happening and we want to ensure our architecture doesn’t
break or even create new security needs. Overall, all aspects are key and
relevant.
JM: I agree. The entire Model is applicable to product development and is a comprehensive and inclusive specification. I cannot point to a single section to that is subordinate to other sections in the Model.
David McIntyre (DM):
It’s an interesting time for these three domains – compute, storage, and
networking – which are beginning to merge and support each other. The 1.0 Model has a nice baseline on definitions
– before this there were none, but now we have Computational Storage Devices (CSxes),
(Computational Storage Processors (CSPs), Computational Storage Drives (CSDs),
and Computational Storage Arrays (CSAs)), and more; and companies can better
define what is a CSP and how it connects to associated storage. Definitions
help to educate and ground the ecosystems and the engineering community, and
how to characterize our vendor solutions into these categories.
BM: I would say that the
four most important parts of the 1.0 Model are:
1) it defines terminology that can be used across different protocols; 2)
it defines a discovery process flow for those architectures; 3) it defines
security considerations for those architectures; and 4) it gives users some
examples that can be used for those architectures.
SOS: Who do you
see as the audience/user for the Model?
What should these constituencies do with the Model?
JM: The Model is useful for both hardware developers who are
developing their own computational storage systems, as well as software architects,
programmers, and other users to be educated on definitions and the common
framework that the architecture describes for computational storage. This will
enable everyone to be on the same playing field. The intent is for everyone to have the same
level of understanding and to carry on conversations with internal and external
developers that are working on related projects. Now they can speak on the same
plane. Our wish is for folks to adhere
to the model and follow it in their product development.
DM: Having an industry developed reference architecture that
hardware and application developers refer to is an important attribute of the
1.0 specification, especially as we get into cloud to edge deployment where
standardization has not been as early.
Putting compute where data is at the edge – where data is being driven –
gives the opportunity to provide normalization and standardization that application
developers can refer to contributing computational storage solutions to the edge
ecosystem.
SS: Version 1.0 is designed with customers to be used as a full
reference document. It is an opportunity
to highlight that vendors and solutions providers are doing it in a directed
and unified way. Customers with a multi-sourcing
strategy see this as something that resonates well to drive involvement with
the technology.
SOS: Are there other activities within SNIA going along
with the release of the Model?
BM: The CS TWG is
actively developing a Computational Storage API that will utilize the Model and
provide an application programming interface for which vendors can provide a
library that maps to their particular protocol, which would include the NVMe®
protocol layer.
JM: The TWG is also collaborating with the SNIA Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) Technical Work Group on how SDXI and computational storage can potentially be combined in the future.
There is a good opportunity for security to continue to be a
focus of discussion in the TWG – examining the threat matrix as the Model
evolves to ensure that we are not recreating or disbanding what is out there –
and that we use existing solutions.
DM: From a security
standpoint the Model and the API go hand in hand as critical components far
beyond the device level. It is very
important to evolve where we are today from device to solution level
capabilities. Having this group of
specifications is very important to contribute to the overall ecosystem.
SOS: Are there any industry activities going along with the release of version 1.0 of the Model?
BM: NVM Express®
is continuing their development effort on computational storage programs and Subsystems
Local Memory that will provide a mechanism to implement the SNIA Architecture
and Programming Model.
JM: Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) is a logical progression for
computational storage from an interface perspective. As time moves forward, we look for much work
to be done in that area.
SS: We know from Flash Memory Summit 2022 that CXL is a next
generation transport planned for both storage and memory devices. CXL focuses on memory today and the high-speed
transport expected there. CXL is the basically the transport beyond NVMe. One
key feature of the SNIA Architecture and Programming Model is to ensure it can apply
to CXL, Ethernet, or other transports as it does not dictate the transport
layer that is used to talk to the Computational Storage Devices (CSxes).
DM: Standards bodies
have been siloed in the past. New opportunities of interfaces and protocols
that work together harmoniously will better enable alliances to form. Grouping of standards that work together will
better support application requirements from cloud to edge.
SOS: Any final
thoughts?
BM: You may ask “Will there be a next generation of the
Model?” Yes, we are currently working on the next generation with security
enhancements and any other comments we get from public utilization of the
Model. Comments can be sent to the SNIA
Feedback Portal.
DM: We also welcome input from other industry organizations
and their implementations.
BM: For example, if there are implications to the Model from
work done by CXL, they could give input and the TWG would work with CXL to
integrate necessary enhancements.
JM: CXL could develop new formats specific to Computational Storage. Any new commands could still align with the
model since the model is transport agnostic.
SOS: Thanks for your time in discussing the Model. Congratulations on the 1.0 release! And for our readers, check out these links for more information on computational storage:
SNIA is pleased to be part of the Flash Memory Summit 2022 agenda
August 1-4, 2022 at the Santa Clara CA Convention Center, with our volunteer leadership
demonstrating solutions, chairing and speaking in sessions, and networking with
FMS attendees at a variety of venues during the conference.
The ever-popular SNIA Reception at FMS features the SNIA groups Storage Management Initiative, Compute Memory and Storage Initiative, and Green Storage Initiative, along with SNIA alliance partners CXL Consortium, NVM Express, and OpenFabrics Alliance. Stop by B-203/204 at the Convention Center from 5:30 – 7:00 pm Monday August 1 for refreshments and networking with colleagues to kick off the week!
You won’t want to miss SNIA’s mainstage presentation on Wednesday August 3 at 2:40 pm in the Mission City Ballroom. SNIA Vice Chair Richelle Ahlvers of Intel will provide a perspective on how new storage technologies and trends are accelerating through standards and open communities.
In the Exhibit Hall, SNIA Storage Management Initiative and Compute Memory and Storage Initiative are FMS Platinum sponsors with a SNIA Demonstration Pavilion at booth #725. During exhibit hours Tuesday evening through Thursday afternoon, 15 SNIA member companies will be featured in live technology demonstrations on storage management, computational storage, persistent memory, sustainability, and form factors; a Persistent Memory Programming Workshop and Hackathon; and theater presentations on SNIA’s standards and alliance work.
Long standing SNIA technology focus areas in computational storage and memory will be represented in the SNIA sponsored System Architectures Track (SARC for short) – Tuesday for memory and Thursday for computational storage. SNIA is also pleased to sponsor a day on CXL architectures, memory, and storage talks on Wednesday. These sessions will all be in Ballroom G.
A new Sustainability Track on Thursday morning in Ballroom A led by the SNIA Green Storage Technical Work Group includes presentations on SSD power management, real world applications and storage workloads, and a carbon footprint comparison of SSDs vis HDDs, followed by a panel discussion. SSDs will also be featured in two SNIA-led presentation/panel pairs – SSDS-102-1 and 102-2 Ethernet SSDs on Tuesday afternoon in Ballroom B and SSDS-201-1 and 201-2 EDSFF E1 and E3 form factors on Wednesday morning in Ballroom D. SNIA Swordfish will be discussed in the DCTR-102-2 Enterprise Storage Part 2 session in Ballroom D on Tuesday morning
And the newest SNIA technical work group – DNA Data Storage– will lead a new-to-2022 FMS track on Thursday morning in Great America Meeting Room 2, discussing topics like preservation of DNA for information storage, the looming need for molecular storage, and DNA sequencing at scale. Attendees can engage for questions and discussion in Part 2 of the track.
Additional
ways to network with SNIA colleagues include the always popular chat with the
experts – beer and pizza on Tuesday evening, sessions on cloud storage, artificial
intelligence, blockchain, and an FMS theater presentation on real world storage
workloads.
Full details on session times, locations, chairs and speakers for all these exciting FMS activities can be found at www.snia.org/fms and on the Flash Memory Summit website. SNIA colleagues and friends can register for $100.00 off the full conference or single day packages using the code SNIA22 at www.flashmemorysummit.com.
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.
Our recent SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage
Initiative (CMSI) webcast, Computational
Storage – Driving Success, Driving Standards,
explained the key elements of the SNIA Computational Storage Architecture and
Programming Model and the SNIA Computational Storage API . If you missed the
live event, you can watch
on-demand and view the presentation slides. Our
audience asked a number of questions, and Bill Martin, Editor of the Model, and
Jason Molgaard, Co-Chair of the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work
Group, teamed up to answer them.
What’s being done in SNIA to implement data
protection (e.g. RAID) and CSDs? Can data be written/striped to CSDs in such a
way that it can be computed on within the drive?
Bill Martin: The
challenges of computation on a RAID system are outside the scope of the Computational
Storage Architecture and Programming Model. The Model does not
address data protection in that it does not specify how data is written nor how
computation is done on the data. Section
3 of the Model discusses the Computational Storage Array (CSA), a storage array
that is able to execute one or more Computational Storage Functions (CSFs). As
a storage array, a CSA contains control software, which provides virtualization
to storage services, storage devices, and Computational Storage Resources for
the purpose of aggregating, hiding complexity, or adding new capabilities to
lower level storage resources. The Computational Storage Resources in the CSA
may be centrally located or distributed across CSDs/CSPs within the array.
When will Version 1.0 of the Computational
Storage Architecture and Programming Model be available and when is operating
system support expected?
Bill Martin: We
expect Version 1.0 of the model to be available Q2 2022. The Model is agnostic with regard to
operating systems, but we anticipate a publicly available API library for
Computational Storage over NVMe.
Will Computational Storage library support CXL
accelerators as well? How is the collaboration between these two technology
consortiums?
Jason Molgaard: The Computational Storage Architecture and
Programming Model is agnostic to the device interface protocol. Computational Storage can work with CXL. SNIA
currently has an alliance
agreement in place with the CXL Consortium and will interface with that
group to help enable the CXL interface with Computational Storage. We anticipate there will be technical work to
develop a computational storage library utilizing the CS API that will support
CXL in the future.
System memory is required for PCIe/NVMe SSD.
How does computational storage bypass system memory?
Bill Martin: The computational storage architecture relies
on computation using memory that is local to the Computational Storage Device (CSx).Section
B.2.4 of the Model
describes the topic of Function Data Memory (FDM) on the CSx and the movement
of data from media to FDM and back. Note
that a device does not need to access system memory for computation – only to
read and write data. Figure B.2.8 from the Model illustrates CSx usage.
Is this CS API Library vendor
specific, or is this a generic library which could also be provided for example
by an operating system vendor?
Bill Martin: The Computational
Storage API is not a library, it is a generic interface
definition. It describes the software
application interface definitions for a Computational Storage device (CSx).There
will be a generic library for a given protocol layer, but there may also be
vendor specific additions to that generic library for vendor specific CSx
enhancements beyond the standard protocol definition.
Are there
additional use cases out there? Where could I see them and get more information?
Jason
Molgaard: Section B.2.5 of the Computational
Storage Architecture and Programming Model provides an example of application
deployment. The API specification will
have a library that could be used and/or modified for a specific device. If the
CSx does not support everything in NVMe, an individual could write a vendor
specific library that supports some host activity.
There are a lot of acronyms
and terms used in the discussion. Is
there a place where they are defined?
Jason Molgaard: Besides the Model and the API, which provide
the definitive definition of the terms and acronyms, there are some great
resources. Recent presentations at the
SNIA Storage Developer Conference on Computational Storage Moving Forward with an Architecture and
API
and Computational Storage APIs provide a broad view
of how the specifications affect the growing industry computational storage
efforts. Additional videos and presentations are available in the SNIA
Educational Library, search for “Computational
Storage”.
