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I think technology like this should force us to rethink how we do stuff at a fundamental level. Does the concept of treating "storage hardware" and "compute har
by abraxas 5y ago
I think technology like this should force us to rethink how we do stuff at a fundamental level. Does the concept of treating "storage hardware" and "compute hardware" even make sense in this world?
We should probably start rethinking everything we do from the OS layer to the way we write applications and exchange data. Truly performant non-volatile RAM would be (will be?) a revolution that rivals some of the earliest groundbreaking work in computer science.
- arghnoname 5y agoDefinitely. You also have stuff like putting compute into the hardware. I read somewhere about SSDs with on-board compute doing serialization/deserialization of some data structures on the device itself, for instance. You can, in principle, take compute on board a NIC and if you could address the memory controller directly, you could serve NVRAM backed key-value store directly, without the CPU at all. Things are getting mushy and our way of addressing hardware resources and the OS abstractions behind them aren’t up to the task anymore. In the research world, due to various things about the kind of work that is feasible to do and get published in a reasonable timeframe, they just aren’t looking at these bigger questions as deeply as I think they ought to. People do more minor iterations on the existing approaches, which is a pity.
- pishpash 5y agoThat's not putting compute into hardware (i.e. for the first time), that's just building custom application-specific hardware, which happens all the time. You used to have the floating point unit outside the CPU.
- pmontra 5y agoSome fundamentals don't change. One one side there are processors (CPU, GPU, whatever) and on the other side we want to persistent some data for decades in some format that lets us exchange it with other people or multiple applications inside the same box. I don't expect ext4 and NTFS to go away soon. In between could totally change.
- pishpash 5y agoWhy would it be any different than now? What fundamentally changes if RAM itself became persistent vs. being persistable to other hardware, except you'd save the one-time data loading cost? Case in point, RTX 3090 GPU's have 24GB of RAM on board, and they're left always on.
- abraxas 5y agoIf RAM and storage become one and the same the way you store your data in memory is how you store your data permanently. The state of your application becomes your data storage. Or at least in theory it could.
- pishpash 5y agoYeah but the point is you can do that today. The OS does it with hibernation.
- inetknght 5y ago> The state of your application becomes your data storage. That's honestly a worst-case scenario. Imagine an application that is permanently in RAM -- and no matter how often you kill it, it will never "reload" from a clean state.
- 5y ago