updated March 2025

SNIA and the Compute, Memory, and Storage (CMS) Community Computational Storage technical work and marketing initiatives are part of the SNIA Accelerate Data Focus Area and an exciting direction of adding computation to the normal storage features of devices and systems to realize a significant performance and infrastructure scaling advantage.

SNIA Computational Storage TWG Co-Chairs Bill Martin and Jason Molgaard review SNIA Computational Storage activities in this SNIA Storage Developer Conference presentation.

The industry is seeing an increase in customer requirements to move compute closer to traditional storage devices and systems.

Computational Storage solutions typically target applications where the demand to process ever-growing storage workloads is outpacing traditional compute server architectures. These applications include AI, big data, content delivery, database, machine learning and many others that are used industry-wide.

The SNIA Computational Storage Special Interest Group (SIG), a part of the CMS, evangelizes SNIA's technical work in computational storage, including developing white papers and webcasts, and speaking at SNIA and industry events. Check out their latest activities:

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Check out the CMS Knowledge Center and the SNIA Educational Library (search for "computational") for even more materials.

Computational storage technical work is accomplished by the SNIA Computational Storage TWG. The TWG has just published the Computational Storage Architecture and Programming Model v1.0, which defines recommended behavior for hardware and software that supports computational storage, and the Computational Storage API v1.0. SNIA welcomes your comments on these specifications at the SNIA Feedback Portal.

Congratulations to the SNIA Computational Storage TWG and the authors of the Computational Storage API for their Most Innovative Memory Technology (Standards) Best of Show Award at the 2023 Flash Memory Summit. Well done!

Two recent videos and presentations on the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Work Group 2025 Plans and  SNIA Computational Storage Standards provide an overview of SNIA work in this area.

tech

SNIA on Computation

Standards and Specifications

Technical Work Groups

Computational Storage Resources

Computational Storage Use Cases