New terabyte-scale fabric attached memory

Call me easy to impress, but I’m captivated by the idea of network attached memory.

Anyway, SC Online points us to the tale of Violin Memory, System Fabric Works, and Fabric Attached Memory:

Fabric Attached Memory provides High Performance Computing (HPC) environments with a uniquely scalable and low latency approach to sharing data within a cluster. Violin’s memory can scale to over 8 TByte of DRAM in a single rack and the OpenFabrics software (InfiniBand or 10 Gb Ethernet) supports bandwidths greater than 1 GByte/s per server with random access patterns. Applications that are seek-bound or latency sensitive will greatly benefit from Fabric Attached Memory.

…“System Fabric Works provides the lowest latency Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) software for Fabric Attachment,” said Donpaul Stephens, President of Violin Memory. “Fabric Attachment enables sharing and dramatically lowers the effective cost of memory in an HPC environment.”