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8th Parallel Data Storage Workshopheld in conjunction withSC13Chairs: ,Monday, November 18, 2013 |
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: nisha talagala, fusion-io
The All-Flash Datacenter
abstract: Flash based non volatile memory is revolutionizing data center architectures, improving application performance by bridging the gap between DRAM and disk. Future non volatile memories promise performance even closer to DRAM. While flash adoption in industry started as disk replacement, the past several years have seen data center architectures change to take advantage of flash as a new memory tier in both servers and storage.
This talk covers the state of the art in non volatile memory technology. We describe the range of flash usage in the datacenter and examples of the performance and efficiency benefits achievable with flash. We also describe the stresses that non volatile memory places on existing application and OS designs, and illustrate optimizations to further exploit non-volatile memory as a new memory tier. Until the introduction of flash, there has been no compelling reason to change the existing operating system storage stack. We present the motivation for and describe examples of open source 'flash aware' applications in databases, the virtual memory swap subsystem, and NoSQL key-value stores. Instead of using traditional layers of abstraction between applications and block storage devices, flash aware applications use direct programmatic access to the non-volatile memory to bypass software overheads and make use of new primitives to better integrate with flash management. We also provide an overview of work in standards bodies, operating systems and in the open source community to support new usages and programming optimizations for data center flash. (slides)
speaker bio: Nisha Talagala (ntalagala@fusionio.com) is Lead Architect at Fusion-io, where she works on innovation in non volatile memory technologies and applications. Nisha has more than 10 years of expertise in software development, distributed systems, storage and I/O solutions, and non-volatile memory. She has worked as technology lead for server flash at Intel - where she led server platform non volatile memory technology development, storage-memory convergence, and partnerships. Prior to Intel, Nisha was the CTO of Gear6, where she designed and built clustered computing caches for high performance I/O environments. Nisha also served at Sun Microsystems, where she developed storage and I/O solutions and worked on file systems. Nisha earned her PhD at UC Berkeley where she did research on clusters and distributed storage. Nisha holds more than 30 patents in distributed systems, networking, storage, performance and non-volatile memory.