Franek Boehlke recently attended the SNIA Persistent Memory and Computational Storage Summit. There were 2 days of presentations and panels on these two very active areas. Both the expected developments and existing use cases were covered. The conference was fully online, with the presentations shown on a dedicated webpage and published YouTube just afterwards, and Slack for discussions.
We got a comprehensive summary of emerging PM (Persistent Memory) technologies from Objective Analysis . Several of these are actively developing and may become an industry standard in just a few years, along traditional RAM, or even replacing it. PM has a wide range of applications, from embedded systems where it excels in power efficiency to data centers where it wins with low price for volume.
Computational storage (CS) was also described in several presentation. It is expected to change the landscape significantly and trigger creation of entirely new computational models, but it’s real abilities are just being discovered now. We got the main models of CS (CSD, CSP, CSA) discussed in a dedicated panel, and a concise rundown in a presentation from from Los Alamos National Labs’ Bradley Settlemyer.
Another topic covered was the CXL interface, that is expected to be a backbone for both PM and CS development in the near future, delivering enough bandwith and power to leverage vast amounts of Persistent Memory and Computational Storage built in a single system.
Persistent Memory and Computational Storage are evolving quickly. While current application are still scarce and experimental, it is quite likely that in a few years they will be as ubiquitous as SSD drives are today.
The recordings from conference are publicly available on SNIAVideo channel.