Category: Case Studies

Register for the PIRL Conference Today

Marty Foltyn
Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences. Read More

Register for the PIRL Conference Today

Marty Foltyn

Registration is now open for the upcoming Persistent Programming in Real Life (PIRL) Conference – July 22-23, 2019 on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

The 2019 PIRL event features a collaboration between UCSD Computer Science and Engineering, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the SNIA to bring industry leaders in programming and developing persistent memory applications together for a two-day discussion on their experiences.

PIRL is a small conference, with attendance limited to under 100 people, including speakers.  It will discuss what real developers have done, and want to do, with persistent memory. Most of the presentations will include demonstrations of live code showing new concepts.  The conference is designed to be a meet-up for developers seeking to gain and share knowledge in the growing area of Persistent Memory development.

PIRL features a program of 18 presentations and 5 keynotes from industry-leading developers who have built real systems using persistent memory.  They will share what they have done (and want to do) with persistent memory, what worked, what didn’t, what was hard, what was easy, what was surprising, and what they learned.

This year’s keynote presentations will be:

  • * Pratap Subrahmanyam (Vmware): Programming Persistent Memory In A Virtualized Environment Using Golang
  • * Zuoyu Tao (Oracle): Exadata With Persistent Memory – An Epic Journey
  • * Dan Williams (Intel Corporation): The 3rd Rail Of Linux Filesystems: A Survival Story
  • * Stephen Bates (Eideticom): Successfully Deploying Persistent Memory and Acceleration Via Compute Express Link
  • * Scott Miller (Dreamworks): Persistent Memory In Feature Animation Production

Other speakers include engineers from NetApp, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle, Sandia National Labs, Intel, SAP, Red Hat, and universities from around the world.  Full details are available at the PIRL website.

PIRL will be held on the University of California San Diego campus at Scripps Forum, a state-of-the-art conference facility just a few meters from the beach.  Discounted early registration ends July 10, so register today to ensure your seat.

Calling All Real-World Workloads

Marty Foltyn
Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right?  It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy.  However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk.  Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application –and an SSD — which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads. Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications.   The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. Read More

Calling All Real-World Workloads

Marty Foltyn

Video streaming is an easy-to-understand workload from the I/O perspective, right?  It’s pretty obvious that it’s a workload heavy on long, streaming reads. The application can be modeled with a consistent read flow, and the software tests should be easy.  However, an analysis of the real-world workload shows something very different. At the disk level, the reads turn out to be a rapid flow of 4k and 8k block reads from a solid-state-disk.  Further, other processes on the system also add in a small amount of 4k and 8k writes in the midst of the reads. All of this impacts the application –and an SSD — which was likely heavily tested on the basis of long, streaming reads.

Understanding the real-world characteristics of a workload can be a significant advantage in the development of new hardware, new systems, and new applications.   The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) and SSSI member company Calypso Systems are providing an opportunity to build a repository of workloads for the industry to use for real-world testing, as outlined in a new SSSI white paper How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution. This paper is also available in Chinese at the SSSI Knowledge Center White Papers page.

By going to the TestMyWorkload site, anyone can participate by providing a trace capture of an I/O workload that can be used by others to develop better products. The capture itself traces the block transfers, but does not capture actual data.  Any workload replay would use representative blocks, so there are no concerns about data security or integrity from these captures.

The repository can be used by any participant to test hardware and software, and can help system vendors and users optimize configurations for the best performance based on real-world data.  By participating in this effort, organizations and individuals can provide insight and gain from the knowledge of all the contributors.

Follow these three steps to be a part of the revolution today!

1.  Read the white paper.

2.  Download the free capture tools at TestMyWorkload.com.

3. Mark your calendar and register HERE to learn more in the free SNIA webcast How to Be a Part of the Real-World Workload Revolution on July 9 at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern.

Innovating File System Architectures with NVMe

Marty Foltyn

It’s exciting to see the recent formation of the Solid State Drive Special Interest Group (SIG) here in the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative.  After all, everyone appreciates the ability to totally geek out about the latest drive technology and software for file systems.  Right? Hey, where’s everyone going? We have vacation pictures with the dog we stored that we want to show…

Solid state storage has long found its place with those seeking greater performance in systems, especially where smaller or more random block/file transfers are prevalent.  Single-system opportunity with NVMe drives is broad, and pretty much unquestioned by those building systems for the modern IT environments. Cloud, likewise, has found use of the technology where single-node performance makes a broader deployment relevant. Read More

Persistently Fun Once Again – SNIA’s 7th Persistent Memory Summit is a Wrap!

kristin.hauser
Leave it to Rob Peglar, SNIA Board Member and the MC of SNIA’s 7th annual Persistent Memory Summit to capture the Summit day as persistently fun with a metric boatload of great presentations and speakers! And indeed it was a great day, with fourteen sessions presented by 23 speakers covering the breadth of where PM is in 2019 – real world, application-focused, and supported by multiple operating systems. Find a great recap on the Forbes blog by Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. Attendees enjoyed live demos of Persistent Memory technologies from AgigA Tech, Intel, SMART Modular, the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Xilinx.  Learn more about what they presented here. And for the first time as a part of the Persistent Memory Summit, SNIA hosted a Persistent Memory Programming Hackathon sponsored by Google Cloud Read More

Registration Now Open for Storage Developer Conference India – May 25-26 in Bangalore

khauser 1 Comment

For the third consecutive year, SNIA will present their highly successful Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in Bangalore, India, on May 25-26, 2017 at the My Fortune Hotel.  The 2017 agenda, developed under the supervision of the SNIA India agenda committee, leads off with a keynote by Indian Institute of Science Professor P. Vijay Kumar on Codes for Big Data:  Error-Correction for Distributed Storage, followed by Amar Tunballi, Engineering Manager at Red Hat, speaking on Software Defined Storage and Why It Will Continue To Be Relevant.  Thursday keynotes will feature Anand Ghatnekar, Country Read More

Your Questions Answered on Non-Volatile DIMMs

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment
  by Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair, SMART Modular SNIA’s Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) Special Interest Group (SIG) had a tremendous response to their most recent webcast:  NVDIMM:  Applications are Here!  You can view the webcast on demand. Viewers had many questions during the webcast.  In this blog, the NVDIMM SIG answers those questions and shares the SIG’s knowledge of NVDIMM technology. Have a question?  Send it to nvdimmsigchair@snia.org. 1. What about 3DXpoint, how will this technology impact the market? Read More

How Many IOPS? Users Share Their 2017 Storage Performance Needs

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment
New on the Solid State Storage website is a whitepaper from analysts Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates and Jim Handy of Objective Analysis which details what IT manager requirements are for storage performance. The paper examines how requirements have changed over a four-year period for a range of applications, including databases, online transaction processing, cloud and storage services, and scientific and engineering computing.  Read More

Cast Your Vote on November 8 for the Magic and Mystery of In-Memory Apps!

Marty Foltyn

It’s an easy “Yes” vote for this great webcast from the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative on the Magic and Mystery of In-Memory Apps! Join us on Election Day – November 8 – at 1:00 pm ET/10:00 am PT to learn about today’s market and the disruptions that happen when combining big-data vote-yes(Petabytes) with in-memory/real-time requirements.  You’ll understand the interactions with Hadoop/Spark, Tachyon, SAP HANA, NoSQL, and the related infrastructure of DRAM, NAND, 3DXpoint, NV-DIMMs, and high-speed networking and learn what happens to infrastructure design and operations when “tiered-memory” replaces “tiered storage”.

Presenter Shaun Walsh of G2M Communications is an expert in memory technology – and a great speaker! He’ll share with you what you need to know about evaluating, planning, and implementing in-memory computing applications, and give you the framework to evaluation and plan for your adoption of in-memory computing.

Register at: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/230103