Category: Persistent Memory

See You – Virtually – at SDC 2021

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

SNIA Storage Developer Conference goes virtual September 28-29 2021, and compute, memory, and storage are important topics.  SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative is a sponsor of SDC 2021 – so visit our booth for the latest information and a chance to chat with our experts.  With over 120 sessions available to watch live during the event and later on-demand, live Birds of a Feather chats, and a Persistent Memory Bootcamp and Hackathon accessing new systems in the cloud, we want to make sure you don’t miss anything!  Register here to see sessions live – or on demand to your schedule. 

Agenda highlights include:

LIVE Birds of a Feather Sessions are OPEN to all – SDC registration not required. Here is your chance, via zoom, to ask your questions of the SNIA experts.  Registration links will go live on September 28 and 29 at this page link.

Computational Storage Talks

A great video provides an overview of sessions. Watch it here.

  • Computational Storage APIs – how the SNIA Computational Storage TWG is leading the way with new interface definitions with Computational Storage APIs that work across different hardware architectures.
  • NVMe Computational Storage Update – Learn what is happening in NVMe to support Computational Storage devices, including a high level architecture that is being defined in NVMe for Computational Storage. The architecture provides for programs based on a standardized eBPF. (Check out our blog on eBPF.)

Persistent Memory Presentations

A great video provides an overview of sessions. Watch it here.

Dive – or Dip – into SNIA Persistent Memory + Computational Storage Summit Content

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

SNIA’s 9th annual Summit was a success with a new name and an expanded focus – Persistent Memory + Computational Storage – from the data center to the edge.  

The Summit moved to a two-day virtual platform and drew twice as many attendees as the previous year. We experimented with 20-minute sessions to great success.  Attendees saw leading technology experts discussing real world applications and use cases, providing insights on technology trends and futures, and networking  in “live via the internet” panels and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.

The recap of our 2021 event – agenda – abstracts – speaker bios – links to videos and presentations – is summarized on the PM+CS Summit home page. 

But we know your time is precious – so here are a few ways to sample a lot of great content presented over two full days.

  1. Read our colleague Tom Coughlin’s Forbes blog on the event
  2. Not only did Tom and Jim Handy present on memory futures at the event, but they also provided the fastest sub-7 minute recaps of both Wednesday’s and Thursday’s sessions with their lively commentary.
  3. New to persistent memory and/or computational storage technologies?  Check out our tutorials featuring Persistent Memory and Computational Storage Special Interest Group leaders giving you what you need to know.
  4. Love the back and forth?  You’ll enjoy the recordings of our live panel sessions where colleagues debate (and sometimes agree) on the topics of today:
  5. Is Persistent Memory your focus?  We’ve sorted the Persistent Memory Summit content for you in our SNIA Educational Library
  6. A Computational Storage man or woman?  Here is the list of all the Computational Storage content during the Summit to watch via our SNIA Educational Library.
  7. Want to get hands-on?  We have extended the opportunity to experience the  Persistent Memory Workshop and Hackathon with access to new cloud-based PM systems for more learning opportunities.

We extend a thank you and shout-out to our SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative members and colleagues who presented in sessions and participated in panels. They represent these leading companies in the industry.

AMD, Arm, Coughlin Associates, Dell, Eideticom, Facebook, Futurewei Technologies, G2M Communications, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intuitive Cognition Consulting, Intel, Lenovo,  Los Alamos National Laboratory, MemVerge, Micron, Microsoft, MKW Ventures Consulting, NGD Systems, NVIDIA, Objective Analysis, Samsung, ScaleFlux, Silinnov Consulting, and SMART Modular Technologies.

We thank our Summit sponsors: Eideticom, MemVerge, Futurewei Technologies, SMART Modular Technologies, and NGD Systems; and the SNIA Compute Memory and Storage Initiative members who underwrote the event.

Finally, we thank you for your interest in SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative outreach and education.  We look forward to seeing you at upcoming SNIA events, including our Storage Developer Conferences in EMEA, India, and the U.S.  Find out more details on SDC.

Cutting Edge Persistent Memory Education – Hear from the Experts!

Jim Fister Leave a comment

Most of the US is currently experiencing an epic winter.  So much for 2021 being less interesting than 2020.  Meanwhile, large portions of the world are also still locked down waiting for vaccine production.  So much for 2020 ending in 2020.  What, oh what, can possibly take our minds off the boredom?

Here’s an idea – what about some education in persistent memory programming?  SNIA and UCSD recently hosted an online conference on Persistent Programming In Real Life (PIRL), and the videos of all the sessions are now available online.  There are nearly 20 hours of content including panel discussions, academic, and industry presentations.  Recordings and PDFs of the presentations have been posted on the PIRL site as well as in the SNIA Educational Library.

In addition, SNIA is now in planning for our April 21-22, 2021 virtual Persistent Memory and Computational Storage Summit, where we’ll be featuring the latest content from the data center to the edge. Complimentary registration is now open. If you’re interested in helping us plan, or proposing content, you can contact us to provide input.

Spring will be here soon, with some freedom from cold, lockdown, and boredom.  We hope to see you virtually at the summit, full of knowledge from your perusal of SNIA education content.

Experts Speak at Flash Memory Summit

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment



2020 brought new developments in persistent memory and computational storage. SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative was pleased to sponsor two tracks at the recent Flash Memory Summit where industry leaders captured the advances.  Videos and presentations are now available.

In the Persistent Memory Track, Dave Eggleston of Intuitive Cognition Consulting and Chris Petersen of Facebook combine to deliver a state of the union address for the industry effort underway to deliver persistent memory. They examine industry advances of persistent memory media, the new devices and form factors for persistent memory attachment, remote and direct-attached PM with low latency interfaces like CXL, and describe the best fit applications and use cases for persistent memory.

Jia Shi of Oracle and Yao Yue of Twitter then dive into a rapid-fire presentation on two examples of how persistent memory is changing the landscape – in appliances, in infrastructure, and in applications – from the perspective of a social networking company and a cloud and enterprise software provider.  They highlight the motivation for using persistent memory and the delivered results

Finally, Ginger Gilsdorf of Intel and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates look ahead to how Persistent Memory technology is evolving, including maximizing performance in next-generation applications, and provide their perspective on PM market growth projections.

The track concludes with speakers reuniting in a panel to discuss the reasons that have stopped persistent memory from gaining wider usage and identifying breakthroughs that are beginning to appear.

The Computational Storage Track opens with an update by Chuck Sobey of Channel Science who discusses the shifting of compute power to the storage; use cases including database, big data, AI/ML, and edge applications; and how the framework for computational storage is driven by SNIA and the NVM Express standards groups.

Stephen Bates of Eideticom follows with an outline of the state of the nation in computational storage standards. He then describes computational storage examples already in use that illustrate ways storage challenges are being met, and comments on promising directions to explore for the future.

Andy Walls of IBM then discusses using computational storage to handle big data, allowing data to reside close to processing power, thus allowing processing tasks to be in-line with data accesses. He covers computational storage examples already in use for application distribution and other promising directions to explore for the future.

Neil Werdmuller and Jason Molgaard of Arm discuss flexible computational storage solutions, and how data-driven applications that benefit from database searches, data manipulation, and machine learning can perform better and be more scalable if developers add computation directly to storage.

A lively panel with Arm, Eideticom, NGD Systems, and ScaleFlux rounds out the track, discussing keys to making computational storage work in your applications.  

Enjoy these presentations and contact us at askcmsi@snia.org with your questions and comments!



See You (Online) at SDC!

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

We’re going virtual in 2020, and Compute, Memory, and Storage are important topics at the upcoming SNIA Storage Developer Conference.  SNIA CMSI is a sponsor of SDC 2020 – so visit our booth for the latest information and a chance to chat with our experts.  With over 120 sessions available to watch live during the event and later on-demand, live Birds of a Feather chats, and a Persistent Memory Bootcamp accessing new PM systems in the cloud, we want to make sure you don’t miss anything!  Register here to see sessions live – or on demand to your schedule.  Agenda highlights include:

Computational Storage Talks

Deploying Computational Storage at the Edge – discussing the deployment of small form factor, asic-based, solutions, including a use case.

Next Generation Datacenters require composable architecture enablers and deterministic programmable intelligence – explaining why determinism, parallel programming and ease of programming are important.

Computational Storage Birds of a Feather LIVE Session – ask your questions of our experts and see live demos of computational storage production systems. Tuesday September 22, 2020 – 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm PDT (UTC-7)

Persistent Memory Presentations

Caching on PMEM: an Iterative Approach – discussing Twitter’s approach to exploring in-memory caching.

Challenges and Opportunities as Persistence Moves Up the Memory/Storage Hierarchy – show how and why memory at all levels will become persistent.

Persistent Memory on eADR System – describes how the SNIA Persistent Memory Programming Model will include the possibility of platforms where the CPU caches are considered permanent and need no flushing.

Persistent Memory Birds of a Feather LIVE Session – ask your questions to our experts on your bootcamp progress, how to program PM, or what PM is shipping today . Tuesday, September 22, 2020 – 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm PDT (UTC-7)

Solid State Storage Sessions

Enabling Ethernet Drives – provides a glimpse into a new SNIA standard that enables SSDs to have an Ethernet interface, and discussed the latest management standards for NVMe-oF drives.

An SSD for Automotive Applications – details efforts under way in JEDEC to define a new Automotive SSD standard.

Your Questions Answered on CMSI and More

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

The “new” SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative (CMSI) was formed at the beginning of 2020 out of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative.  The 45 companies who comprise the CMSI recognized the opportunity to combine storage, memory, and compute in new, novel, and useful ways; and to bring together technology, alliances, education, and outreach to better understand new opportunities and applications. 

To better explain this decision, and to talk about the various aspects of the Initiative, CMSI co-chair Alex McDonald invited CMSI members Eli Tiomkin, Jonmichael Hands, and Jim Fister to join him in a live SNIA webcast. 

Read More

Going Stir Crazy? Expand Your PM Resume at These Virtual Events!

Jim Fister Leave a comment

We here at SNIA know that everyone is getting a tad stir crazy sitting at home. However, there are still some great opportunities to learn while you’re trying to decide which wall of the home office to face tomorrow. SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initative (CMSI) member company Intel is offering some excellent resources for those interested in programming persistent memory using the open-source Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK).

Intel is hosting a virtual forum on PMDK, along with the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), and vTune Profiler tools. This is a great opportunity to meet virtually with the teams who are developing the tools as well as the community building applications. The Virtual Forum runs June 23-35, with special focus on PMDK on June 25th. There are a variety of exciting sessions all three days.

Intel is also hosting two BrightTALK seminars on Persistent Memory. The first, Building Durable Storage Solutions with Intel Optane Persistent Memory on June 23rd, will focus on remote applications for persistent memory. Especially for those interested in networked storage solutions, this will be a great educational webinar. The second, Enabling Persistent Memory Usages in Cloud on June 30th, will cover how many of the most popular in-memory databases already take advantage of Persistent Memory.

In addition, SNIA is continuing to advance the Persistent Memory development conversation. We announced at the Persistent Memory Summit in January that SNIA would be exploring more opportunity for online development using Persistent Memory, as well as an Optane Memory Programming Challenge. Both of these will be active for the second half of this year, and you can watch this space for a formal announcement in the next month.  Learn about our successful NVDIMM Programming Challenge journey here.

Please feel free to register for the above events to learn more and join the community.

And may we suggest the north office wall for tomorrow?

Note: This has also been cross-posted at the PIRL Blog, a collaborative effort of the USCD Non-Volatile Systems Lab and SNIA. Go check out PIRL for some more Persistent Memory Development content.

Everyone Wants Their Java to Persist

Jim Fister Leave a comment

In this time of lockdown, I’m sure we’re all getting a little off kilter. I mean, it’s one thing to get caught up listening to tunes in your office to avoid going out and alerting your family of the fact that you haven’t changed your shirt in two days. It’s another thing to not know where a clean coffee cup is in the house so you can fill it and face the day starting sometime between 5AM and Noon. Okay, maybe we’re just talking about me, sorry. But you get the point.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had some caffeinated source that was good forever? I mean… persistence of Java? At this point, it’s not just me.

Okay, that’s not what this webinar will be talking about, but it’s close. SNIA member Intel is offering an overview of the ways to utilize persistent memory in the Java environment. In my nearly two years here at SNIA, this has been one of the most-requested topics. Steve Dohrmann and Soji Denloye are two of the brightest minds in enabling persistence, and this is sure to be an insightful presentation.

Persistent memory application capabilities are growing significantly.  Since the publication of the SNIA NVM Programming Model developed by the SNIA Persistent Memory Programming Technical Work Group, new language support seems to be happening every day.  Don’t miss the opportunity to see the growth of PM programming in such a crucial space as Java.

The presentation is on BrighTALK, and will be live on May 27th at 10am PST. You can see the details at this link.

Now I just have to find a clean cup.

This post is also cross-posted at the PIRL Blog.  PIRL is a joint effort by SNIA and UCSD’s Non-Volatile Systems Lab to advance the conversation on persistent memory programming.  Check out other entries here.

Your Questions Answered on Persistent Memory Programming

Jim Fister Leave a comment

On April 14, the SNIA Compute Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI) held a webcast asking the question – Do You Wanna Program Persistent Memory? We had some answers in the affirmative – answering the call of the NVDIMM Programming Challenge. 

The Challenge utilizes a set of systems SNIA provides for the development of applications that take advantage of persistent memory. These systems support persistent memory types that can utilize the SNIA Persistent Memory Programming Model, and that are also supported by the Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK) Libraries. 

The NVDIMM Programming Challenge seeks innovative applications and tools that showcase the features persistent memory will enable. Submissions are judged by a panel of SNIA leaders and individual contest sponsors.  Judging is scheduled at the convenience of the submitter and judges, and done via conference call.  The program or results should be able to be visually demonstrated using remote access to a PM-enabled server.

NVDIMM Programming Challenge participant Steve Heller from Chrysalis Software joined the webcast to discuss the Three Misses Hash Table, which uses persistent memory to store large amounts of data that greatly increases the speed of data access for programs that use it.  During the webcast a small number of questions came up that this blog answers, and we’ve also provided answers to subjects stimulated by our conversation. 

Q: What are the rules/conditions to access SNIA PM hardware test system to get hands on experience? What kind of PM hardware is there? Windows/Linux?

A: Persistent memory, such as NVDIMM or Intel Optane memory, enables many new capabilities in server systems.  The speed of storage in the memory tier is one example, as is the ability to hold and recover data over system or application resets.  The programming challenge is seeking innovative applications and tools that showcase the features persistent memory will enable.

The specific systems for the different challenges will vary depending on the focus.  The current system is built using NVDIMM-N.  Users are given their own Linux container with simple examples in a web-based interface.  The users can also work directly in the Linux shell if they are comfortable with it.

Q: During the presentation there was a discussion on why it was important to look for “corner cases” when developing programs using Persistent Memory instead of regular storage.  Would you elaborate on this?

A: As you can see in the chart at the top of the blog post, persistent memory significantly reduces the amount of time to access a piece of data in stored memory.  As such, the amount of time that the program normally takes to process the data becomes much more important.  Programs that are used to data retrieval taking a significant amount of time can then occasionally absorb a “processing” performance hit that an extended data sort might imply.  Simply porting a file system access to persistent memory could result in strange performance bottlenecks, and potentially introduce race conditions or strange bugs in the software.  The rewards of fixing these issues will be significant performance, as demonstrated in the webcast.

Q: Can you please comment on the scalability of your HashMap implementation, both on a single socket and across multiple sockets?

The implementation is single threaded. Multiple threading poses lots of overhead and opportunity for mistakes. It is easy to saturate performance that only persistent memory can provide. There is likely no benefit to the hash table in going multi-threaded. It is not impossible – one could do an example of a hash table per volume. I have run across multiple sockets that were slower with an 8% to 10% variation in performance in an earlier version.  There are potential cache pollution issues with going multi-threaded as well.

The existing implementation will scale one to 15 billion records, and we would see the same thing if we have enough storage. The implementation does not use much RAM if it does not cache the index.  It only uses 100mb of RAM for test data and does not use memory.

Q: How would you compare your approach to having smarter compilers that are address aware of “preferred” addresses to exploit faster memories?

The Three Misses implementation invented three new storage management algorithms.  I don’t believe that compilers can invent new storage algorithms.  Compilers are much improved since their beginnings 50+ years ago when you could not mix integers and floating-point numbers, but they cannot figure out how to minimize accesses.  Smart compilers will probably not help solve this specific problem.

The SNIA CMSI is continuing its efforts on persistent memory programming.  If you’re interested in learning more about persistent memory programming, you can contact us at pmhackathon@snia.org to get updates on existing contests or programming workshops.  Additionally, SNIA would be willing to work with you to host physical or virtual programming workshops.

Please view the webcast and contact us with any questions.

Feedback Needed on New Persistent Memory Performance White Paper

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

A new SNIA Technical Work draft is now available for public review and comment – the SNIA Persistent Memory Performance Test Specification (PTS) White Paper.

A companion to the SNIA NVM Programming Model, the SNIA PM PTS White Paper (PM PTS WP) focuses on describing the relationship between traditional block IO NVMe SSD based storage and the migration to Persistent Memory block and byte addressable storage.  

The PM PTS WP reviews the history and need for storage performance benchmarking beginning with Hard Disk Drive corner case stress tests, the increasing gap between CPU/SW/HW Stack performance and storage performance, and the resulting need for faster storage tiers and storage products. 

The PM PTS WP discusses the introduction of NAND Flash SSD performance testing that incorporates pre-conditioning and steady state measurement (as described in the SNIA Solid State Storage PTS), the effects of – and need for testing using – Real World Workloads on Datacenter Storage (as described in the SNIA Real World Storage Workload PTS for Datacenter Storage), the development of the NVM Programming model, the introduction of PM storage and the need for a Persistent Memory PTS.

The PM PTS focuses on the characterization, optimization, and test of persistent memory storage architectures – including 3D XPoint, NVDIMM-N/P, DRAM, Phase Change Memory, MRAM, ReRAM, STRAM, and others – using both synthetic and real-world workloads. It includes test settings, metrics, methodologies, benchmarks, and reference options to provide reliable and repeatable test results. Future tests would use the framework established in the first tests.

The SNIA PM PTS White Paper targets storage professionals involved with: 

  1. Traditional NAND Flash based SSD storage over the PCIe bus;
  2. PM storage utilizing PM aware drivers that convert block IO access to loads and stores; and
  3. Direct In-memory storage and applications that take full advantage of the speed and persistence of PM storage and technologies. 

The PM PTS WP discussion on the differences between byte and block addressable storage is intended to help professionals optimize application and storage technologies and to help storage professionals understand the market and technical roadmap for PM storage.

Eden Kim, chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage TWG and a co-author, explained that SNIA is seeking comment from Cloud Infrastructure, IT, and Data Center professionals looking to balance server and application loads, integrate PM storage for in-memory applications, and understand how response time and latency spikes are being influenced by applications, storage and the SW/HW stack. 

The SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) has published several papers on performance testing and real-world workloads, and the  SNIA PM PTS White Paper includes both synthetic and real world workload tests.  The authors are seeking comment from industry professionals, researchers, academics and other interested parties on the PM PTS WP and anyone interested to participate in development of the PM PTS.

Use the SNIA Feedback Portal to submit your comments.