Category: Training & Seminars

30 Speakers Highlight AI, Memory, Sustainability, and More at the May 21-22 Summit!

SNIA CMSI Leave a comment

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.“

Artificial intelligence sessions sponsored by the SNIA Data, Networking & Storage Forum feature J Michel Metz of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium

(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!

Power Efficiency Measurement – Our Experts Make It Clear – Part 3

Eden Kim, Keith Orsak and Chuck Paradon Leave a comment

Measuring power efficiency in datacenter storage is a complex endeavor. A number of factors play a role in assessing individual storage devices or system-level logical storage for power efficiency. Luckily, our SNIA experts make the measuring easier!

In this SNIA Experts on Data blog series, our experts in the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group and the SNIA Green Storage Initiative explore factors to consider in power efficiency measurement, including the nature of application workloads, IO streams, and access patterns; the choice of storage products (SSDs, HDDs, cloud storage, and more); the impact of hardware and software components (host bus adapters, drivers, OS layers); and access to read and write caches, CPU and GPU usage, and DRAM utilization.

Join us on our journey to better power efficiency as we continue with Part 3: Traditional Differences in Power Consumption: Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives. And if you missed our earlier segments, click on the titles to read them:  Part 1: Key Issues in Power Efficiency Measurement, and Part 2: Impact of Workloads on Power Efficiency Measurement..  Bookmark this blog  and check back in April for the final installment of our four-part series. And explore the topic further in the SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center.

Traditional Differences in Power Consumption: Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives

There are significant differences in power efficiency between Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs). While some commentators have examined differences in power efficiency measurement for HDDs v SSDs, much of the analysis has not accounted for the key power efficiency contributing factors outlined in this blog.

As a simple generalization at the individual storage device level, HDDs show higher power consumption than SSDs.  In addition, SSDs have higher performance (IOPS and MB/s) often by an order of magnitude or more.  Hence, cursory consideration of device power efficiency measurement, expressed as IOPS/W or MB/s/W, will typically favor the faster SSD with lower device power consumption.

On the other hand, depending on the workload and IO transfer size, HDD devices and systems may exhibit better IOPS/W and MB/s/W if measured to large block sequential RW workloads where head actuators can reside on the disk OD (outer diameter) with limited seek accesses.

The above traditional HDD and SSD power efficiency considerations can be described at the device level as involving the following key points:

HDDs (Hard Disk Drives):

  1. Mechanical Components: HDDs consist of spinning disks and mechanical read/write heads. These moving parts consume a substantial amount of power, especially during startup and when seeking data.
  2. Idle Power Consumption: Even when not actively reading or writing data, HDDs still consume a notable amount of power to keep the disks spinning and ready to access data
  3. Access Time Impact: The mechanical nature of HDDs leads to longer access times compared to SSDs. This means the drive remains active for longer periods during data access, contributing to higher power consumption.

SSDs (Solid State Drives):

  1. No Moving Parts: SSDs are entirely electronic and have no moving parts. As a result, they consume less power during both idle and active states compared to HDDs
  2. Faster Access Times: SSDs have much faster access times since there are no mechanical delays. This results in quicker data retrieval and reduced active time, contributing to lower power consumption
  3. Energy Efficiency: SSDs are generally more energy-efficient, as they consume less power during read and write operations. This is especially noticeable in laptops and portable devices, where battery life is critical
  4. Less Heat Generation: Due to their lack of moving parts, SSDs generate less heat during operation, which can lead to better thermal efficiency in systems.

In summary, SSDs tend to be more power-efficient than HDDs due to their lack of mechanical components, faster access times, and lower energy consumption during both active and idle states. This power efficiency advantage is one of the reasons why SSDs have become increasingly popular in various computing devices, from laptops to data centers.

50 Speakers Featured at the 2023 SNIA Compute+Memory+Storage Summit

SNIA CMSI Leave a comment

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.

Learn more in our Summit preview video, check out the agenda, and register for free to access our Summit platform!

Join Us as We Return Live to FMS!

SNIA CMSI Leave a comment

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.

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.

Take 10 – Watch a Computational Storage Trilogy

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

We’re all busy these days, and the thought of scheduling even more content to watch can be overwhelming.  Great technical content – especially from the SNIA Educational Library – delivers what you need to know, but often it needs to be consumed in long chunks. Perhaps it’s time to shorten the content so you have more freedom to watch.

With the tremendous interest in computational storage, SNIA is on the forefront of standards development – and education.  The SNIA Computational Storage Special Interest Group (CS SIG) has just produced a video trilogy – informative, packed with detail, and consumable in under 10 minutes!

What Is Computational Storage?, presented by Eli Tiomkin, SNIA CS SIG Chair, emphasizes the need for common language and definition of computational storage terms, and discusses four distinct examples of computational storage deployments.  It serves as a great introduction to the other videos.

Advantages of Reducing Data Movement frames computational storage advantages into two categories:  saving time and saving money. JB Baker, SNIA CS SIG member, dives into a data filtering computational storage service example and an analytics benchmark, explaining how tasks complete more quickly using less power and fewer CPU cycles.

Eli Tiomkin returns to complete the trilogy with Computational Storage:  Edge Compute Deployment. He discusses how an edge computing future might look, and how computational storage operates in a cloud, edge node, and edge device environment.

Each video in the Educational Library also has a downloadable PDF of the slides that also link to additional resources that you can view at your leisure.  The SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative will be producing more of these short videos in the coming months on computational storage, persistent memory, and other topics.

Check out each video and download the PDF of the slides!  Happy watching!

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.

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.

Judging Has Begun – Submit Your Entry for the NVDIMM Programming Challenge!

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

We’re 11 months in to the Persistent Memory Hackathon program, and over 150 software developers have taken the tutorial and tried their hand at programming to persistent memory systems.   AgigA Tech, Intel,  SMART Modular, and Supermicro, members of the SNIA Persistent Memory and NVDIMM SIG, have now placed persistent memory systems with NVDIMM-Ns into the SNIA Technology Center as the backbone of the first SNIA NVDIMM Programming Challenge.

Interested in participating?  Send an email to PMhackathon@snia.org to get your credentials.  And do so quickly, as the first round of review for the SNIA NVDIMM Programming Challenge is now open.  Read More