Collaboration Summit

Flash based non volatile memory is revolutionizing data center architectures, improving application performance by bridging the gap between DRAM and disk. Future non volatile memories promise performance even closer to DRAM. While flash adoption in industry started as disk replacement, the past several years have seen data center architectures change to take advantage of flash as a new memory tier in both servers and storage.  
This talk covers the implications of nonvolatile memory on software. We describe the stresses that non volatile memory places on existing application and OS designs, and illustrate optimizations to exploit NVM as a new memory tier. Until the introduction of flash, there has been no compelling reason to change the existing operating system storage stack.  We will describe the technologies contained in the upcoming Fusion-io Software Developer Kit (ioMemory SDK) that allow applications to leverage the native capabilities of non-volatile memory as both an I/O device and a memory device. The technologies described will include new I/O based APIs and libraries, as well as features for extending DRAM into flash for cost and power reduction. Finally, we describe Auto-Commit-Memory, a new persistent memory type that will allow applications to combine the benefits of persistence with programming semantics and performance levels normally associated with DRAM. Many elements of this stack will be open sourced to help the developer community utilize and accelerate the adoption of new NVM technologies and interfaces.