Category: Persistent Memory

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.

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

Everything You Wanted to Know about Memory

John Kim
Many followers (dare we say fans?) of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) are familiar with our popular webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask.” If you’ve missed any of the nine episodes we’ve done to date, they are all available on-demand and provide a 101 lesson on a range of storage related topics like buffers, storage controllers, iSCSI and more. Our next “Too Proud to Ask” webcast on May 16, 2019 will be “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask – Part Taupe – The Memory Pod.” Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components. Read More

Your Questions Answered – Applications Take Advantage of Persistent Memory Webcast

Marty Foltyn
We hope you had time to check out our recent webcast on Applications Take Advantage of Persistent Memory.  Raghu Kulkarni of Viking Technology, a member of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, did a great job laying the foundation for an understanding of Persistent Memory today, just in time for the SNIA Persistent Memory Summit. You can catch up on videos of Summit talks, along with the slides presented, here. During the webcast, we had many interesting questions.  Now, as promised, Raghu provides the answers.  Happy reading, and we hope to see you at one of our upcoming webcasts or events. Q.  Does NVDIMM-N encryption lower the performance levels that you presented? Read More

Hacking with the U

Marty Foltyn

It’s now less than three weeks for the next SNIA Persistent Memory Hackathon and Workshop.  Our next workshop will be held in conjunction with the 10th Annual Non-Volatile Memory Workshop (http://nvmw.ucsd.edu/) at the University of California, San Diego on Sunday, March 10th from 2:00pm to 5:30pm.

The Hackathon at NVMW19 provides software developers with an understanding of the different tiers and modes of persistent memory, and gives an overview of the standard software libraries that are available to access persistent memory.  Attendees will have access to system configured with persistent memory, software libraries, and sample source code. A variety of mentors will be available to provide tutorials and guide participants in the development of code. Learn more here.

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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

New Capability in Familiar Places

Marty Foltyn
When it comes to persistent memory, many application developers initially think of change as hard work that likely yields incremental result.  It’s perhaps a better idea to look at the capability that’s new, but that’s already easily accessible using the methods that are in place today.  It’s not that enabling persistent memory is effortless, it’s more that normal code improvement can take advantage of the new features in the standard course of development. The concept of multiple memory tiers is ingrained in nearly every programming model.  While the matrix of possibility can get fairly complex, it’s worth looking at three variables of the memory model.  The first is the access type, either via load/store or block operation. The second is the latency or distance from the processing units; in this case the focus would be on the DIMM.  The last would be memory persistence. Read More

Opportunity for Persistent Memory is Now

Marty Foltyn
It’s very rare that there is a significant change in computer architecture, especially one that is nearly immediately pervasive across the breadth of a market segment.  It’s even more rare when a fundamental change such as this is supported in a way that software developers can quickly adapt to existing software architecture. Most significant transitions require a ground-up rethink to achieve performance or reliability gains, and the cost-benefit analysis generally pushes a transition to the new thing be measured in multiple revisions as opposed to one, big jump. In the last decade the growth of persistent memory has bucked this trend.  The introduction of the solid-state disk made an immediate impact on existing software, especially in the server market.  Any program that relied on multiple, small-data, read/write cycles to disk recognized significant performance increases. In cases such as multi-tiered databases, the software found a, “new tier,” of storage nearly automatically and started partitioning data to it.  In an industry where innovation takes years, improvement took a matter of months to proliferate across new deployments. Read More

Exceptional Agenda – and a Hackathon – Highlight the 2019 SNIA Persistent Memory Summit

Marty Foltyn
SNIA 7th annual Persistent Memory Summit – January 24, 2019 at the Hyatt Santa Clara CA – delivers a far-reaching agenda exploring exciting new topics with experienced speakers:
  • Paul Grun of OpenFabrics Alliance and Cray on the Characteristics of Persistent Memory
  • Stephen Bates of Eideticom, Neal Christiansen of Microsoft, and Eric Kaczmarek of Intel on Enabling Persistent Memory through OS and Interpreted Languages
  • Adam Roberts of Western Digital on the Mission Critical Fundamental Architecture for Numerous In-memory Databases
  • Idan Burstein of Mellanox Technologies on Making Remote Memory Persistent
  • Eden Kim of Calypso Systems on Persistent Memory Performance Benchmarking and Comparison
Read More

Emerging Memory Questions Answered

Marty Foltyn
With a topic like Emerging Memory Poised to Explode, no wonder this SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative webcast generated so much interest!  Our audience had some great questions, and, as promised, our experts Tom Coughlin and Jim Handy provide the answers in this blog. Read on, and join SNIA at the Persistent Memory Summit January 24, 2019 in Santa Clara CA.  Details and complimentary registration are at www.snia.org/pm-summit. Q. Can you mention one or two key applications leading the effort to leverage Persistent Memory? Read More