Threading Opportunities in High-Performance Flash-Memory Storage Craig Ulmer Sandia National...
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Threading Opportunities in High- Performance Flash-Memory Storage Craig Ulmer Sandia National Laboratories, California Maya Gokhale Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000
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Transcript of Threading Opportunities in High-Performance Flash-Memory Storage Craig Ulmer Sandia National...
Threading Opportunities in High-Performance Flash-Memory Storage
Craig Ulmer Sandia National Laboratories, California Maya Gokhale Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000
Revolutionary Storage Technologies
• Storage-Intensive Supercomputing (SISC) at LLNL– System architectures for applications with massive datasets
– New technologies: processing elements, networks, and storage
• NAND-Flash storage in high-performance computing– Flash chips have great potential: 100x access times, 10x bandwidth
– However, few commercial products have delivered performance
• Exception: Fusion-io’s ioDrive– PCIe x4 card with 80-320 GB of flash
– Theoretical read speed of 700 MB/s
– Hardware allows many IOPs to be in-flight concurrently
Threaded I/O Microbenchmarks
• Observation: Increasing number of IOPs improves performance– Opposite of what we expect from hard drives
– Due to flash memory packaging: chip is actually a die stack
• Implemented a set of I/O microbenchmarks to investigate – Threaded with mixed I/O characteristics (mostly read-only)
– Currently: Block transfer, kNN, external sort, binary search
• Example: k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN)– Stream through all training vectors and find
k vectors that are most similar to each input vector
– Each thread works on portion of training data
kNN Results
• Single ioDrive vs. Three SATA hard drives in RAID0– ioDrive provided a 3x improvement to end application
– Small number of threads can have large impact with flash memory
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SATA RAID - 32 Vectors per Pass
ioDrive - 32 Vectors per Pass
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