Storage in transition: the one-two technology punch of solid-state memory and RAM can greatly increase usability.(High Performance Computing)

Publication: Scientific Computing

Publication Date: 01-MAR-08

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Remember when you were a child and got your first bicycle--suddenly the entire neighborhood became accessible. A similar thing happened when you got your first car, the entire town then became accessible. Well, for scientists and computer users, the same thing is happening because we are getting solid-state storage! Now, our databases are becoming accessible without having to pay the pedestrian overhead of seek latency. Instead of waiting for a disk drive to mechanically move physical hardware over a magnet platter, solid-state media just reads and returns the data. While lacking the charm of a flashy automobile, solid-state media is certainly appealing from a time-to-solution point of view.

Adding frosting to the "no seek overhead" cake is the large increase in system random access memory (RAM) capacity caused by increasing densities and plummeting RAM prices. Now, it is possible to purchase commodity systems with 128 GB (gigabyte, or one billion bytes) and even 256 GB of RAM. What this means for the...

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