Exploring New Storage Paradigms and Opportunities with Persistent Memory Technology

Emerging persistent memory technologies, such as sub-microsecond non-volatile DIMMs and in/near-memory compute, are creating new opportunities for application performance improvement by enabling memory-storage convergence. This convergence defines a new paradigm by blurring the boundaries between compute-data and stored-data. In turn, the need to transform and move data (locally or across the network) can be dramatically reduced, leading to orders of magnitude improvement in performance over existing methods. In this talk, we will explore memory-technology trends and the associated system architecture challenges. We will highlight our current work at IBM Research, known as MCAS, to develop a new converged architecture. MCAS (Memory Centric Active Storage) evolves the conventional key-value paradigm to enable seamless data movement and arbitrary in-place operations on structured data in memory, while also providing traditional storage capabilities such as durability, versioning, replication and encryption.

Learning Objectives

Learn about nuances of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory,Understand memory-storage convergence concept and its challenges,Explore Memory Centric Active Storage (MCAS) open-source technology from IBM