2018 The Arc of Intelligence (from Tech Field Day 17)

An examination of the emergence of intelligence in storage devices and a prediction that drives will one day have "Apps" - more to optimize communications than to optimize computing.

From DriveScale at Tech Field Day 17 https://techfieldday.com/appearance/drivescale-presents-at-tech-field-day-17/

1. The Arc of Intelligence
2. Before Intelligence… 2 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
3. The Awakening… 3 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
4. Years Pass… 4 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
5. Hardware Disruption via Software 5 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
6. Apps! 6 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved. Computational Storage?
7. ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved. 7 ▪ Just a protocol – deep and wide queues ▪ Block read/write semantics ▪ Mushrooming complexity in standard ▪ Scary firmware complexity
8. Trouble in BlockVille… ▪ “What the Hardware Giveth, the Software Taketh Away” ▪ In many cases, all that firmware gets in the way of peak performance ▪ “Open Channel SSDs” / LightNVM – Move (most) intelligence back to the host ala Fusion-IO ▪ Samsung Key/Value SSDs – Move some of the app to the SSD ▪ Normal, Open Channel, and KV SSDs are all the *same* hardware 8 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
9. NVMe Over Fabrics ▪ “Fabric” implies a tightly specified and controlled domain ▪ Enterprise Ethernets: ▪ NVMe over TCP will make a big difference 9 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
10. Controllers ▪ NVMe, because it is PCIe, got rid of the controller (SAS, SATA) between host and device ▪ NVMe-o-F requires a new kind of controller (fabric to NVMe) between host and device ▪ Intense innovation and competition for this controller technology – HW: x86, Broadcom, Mellanox, Kazan – SW: Many startups, Toshiba Kumoscale ▪ But the best controller is no controller – 1st step: WDC OpenFlex 10 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
11. Computational or “Eusocial” storage ▪ Intelligence in the device ▪ Move compute to the storage, leverage parallelism – Teradata, Netezza, Hadoop, … ▪ NGD Systems – 4 core ARM64 running Linux – in the SSD ▪ ScaleFlux – programmable FPGA + SSD ▪ But incumbent device manufacturers have no appetite for apps – They live on standards – Just like Nokia before the iPhone! 11 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
12. Where do standards stop and apps begin? 12 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
13. Communication ▪ Today’s phones are still fundamentally communications devices ▪ They speak 1000s of protocols aka APIs – But only because they are programmable ▪ Programmability is fundamental to optimizing communication ▪ Take away the human? – Programmability + Communication = Internet of Things 13 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
14. Drives are Things Too ▪ Let’s make drives (and/or controllers) great at communications, not just “computational” – It’ll still be storage, but with optimized protocols – Will augment, not replace, servers ▪ Put them on the fabric, i.e. TCP/IP/Ethernet (NVMe too) ▪ Linux, of course. Kubernetes, probably. ▪ #InternetOfDrives 14 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
15. Communication is THE Problem ▪ “99% of commercial computing is just moving data around” ▪ “Computation is often cheaper than communication” ▪ “Communication is the problem to the answer” 15 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
16. But what about Disaggregation? Composability? ▪ Getting the device out of the server is the first step – Today storage, tomorrow accelerators, then DRAM ▪ Every “liberated” device will have some amount of compute, storage, and networking capability ▪ The trick is creating, at any time, the best composite from the components – Like assembling a team from people of diverse talents ▪ We make compute infrastructure adaptable and programmable! 16 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.
17. 17 ©2018 DriveScale Inc. All Rights Reserved.