HPCwire: Solid State Drives: Change in a Flash

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Topic >> Storage

March 26, 2009

Solid State Drives: Change in a Flash

by John West, for HPCwire

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

There has been a lot of interest among the enterprise datacenter crowd lately in a relatively old technology: solid state drives (SSDs). Today's flash drives are faster and cheaper than their predecessors, and are almost certain to assume a place in the standard enterprise IT architect's toolkit. But it seems that they have quite a bit of potential in HPC too, though not (just) in the way you might think.

When I showed up at my first HPC gig in the early 1990s, our Crays had solid state disks, and they weren't even close to new then; semiconductor memory-based SSDs date back to the 1970s and 80s. But they were expensive, and they didn't really have a place in the commodity-driven economics of the commodity-processor supercomputers that emerged beginning in the mid-90s.

So what is an SSD? The Wikipedia entry says:

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. An SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface, thus easily replacing it in most applications.

Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory technology at Sun, has a similar definition in few words, "An SSD is a non-rotating device that emulates what a disk drive does."

The reason for the renewed interest in this old idea comes down to money. The new generation of SSDs are being built from NAND flash components, the kind of nonvolatile memory used in everything from USB memory drives to cameras and iPods. Driven by the demand in the consumer market, SSD prices have dropped considerably. You can see this effect for yourself when you head down to Best Buy and find that you can buy a 4 GB flash drive for less than $15.00. Just a few years ago, that amount of flash memory would have cost you hundreds of dollars.

This demand also caused the flash memory industry to leapfrog the DRAM industry in terms of the size of the silicon process used to create the chips. David Flynn, chief technical officer and co-founder of Fusion-io, explains that all of this has come together to make NAND flash a very attractive storage option. "Flash memory costs less per bit (than DRAM), doesn't put off heat, and you can stack it vertically into packages and then stack the packages," putting a lot of bits in a very small space.

Flash-based SSDs have many inherent advantages over spinning disks for storage that make them attractive to system architects. In addition to being dense and relatively cool there are no moving parts and, unlike hard disk drives, flash-based SSDs can support between 10 and 20 operations at the same time, making them inherently parallel devices. Flash storage also typically has at least three orders of magnitude lower latency than traditional spinning drives (microseconds versus milliseconds).

Sun's Cornwell says that, as an example, Sun's recently announced SSD offers "thousands of IOPS, which is much greater than the 300 or so you can get from traditional hard disk drives." SSDs also offer substantial power savings, consuming an order of magnitude less power than hard disk drives.

Sounds great, so let's pull out all the disks and replace them with SSDs, right? Not so fast, says Jimmy Daley, HP's Industry Standard Server (ISS) marketing manager. First of all, cost is an issue. While flash-based SSDs are much faster than traditional spinning disks, they are also "an order of magnitude or two more expensive per GB than disk."

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html