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Marvell at FMS 2019: NVMe Over Fabrics Controllers, AI On SSD
Taking things to the logical next step, Marvell also announced a native Ethernet/NVMeoF SSD controller. The 88SS5000 is effectively their 88SS1098 NVMe controller with the PCIe interface replaced by the dual 25GbE interface used by the NVMe to Ethernet converter. This new single-chip solution for Ethernet-attached SSDs helps cut costs and power consumption, making the whole idea more palatable to datacenter customers. Marvell showed samples of this controller paired with 8TB of Toshiba 96L 3D TLC NAND and 12GB of DDR4 DRAM.
Looking further into the future, Marvell shared their take on the idea of Computational Storage—SSDs that do more than just store data. Marvell is working to integrate a Machine Learning engine into future SSD controllers, allowing inferencing tasks to be offloaded from CPUs or GPUs onto the SSDs that already store the data being processed. The hardware setup is basically the same mess of cables connecting FPGAs to Flash that Marvell has shown in previous years, but on the software side their demo has matured greatly.
In addition to demonstrating realtime object recognition using a pre-trained model, Marvell now has a system to perform offline recognition on videos stored on the SSD. Their demo presented the results of this recognition as a graph showing which objects were recognized over the duration of a video. There was also a content-aware search engine that would return the segments of stored videos that depict the requested objects. For the demo, this functionality was exposed through a simple web interface. In production, the envisioned use case is to have an application server aggregating results from an array of content-aware SSDs that each perform some kind of analytics on their share of the overall dataset.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Friday August 16 2019, @08:40PM (1 child)
A really useful addition to dumb storage would be SQL. Then, instead of having to know where your data is, you can search for it using established
and well tested methodology, with thousands of programmers already able to make good use of it.
I proposed this around the time that RAID was invented (mid 1980's), for a large medical application, but it was not very practical at the time.
The problems with "Artificial Intelligence" are that
1) its mostly "Actual Idiocy"
2) any system that learns, must, as part of the same process, forget, as they dynamically alter their "understanding" of the world.
The demand for stupid systems that often forget is already met by the employees of many call centres in the third world.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday August 17 2019, @10:40AM
Even a plain hierarchical file system would be enough. The device could just talk an enhanced version of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) instead of the mass storage block protocol. Completely takes metadata, journal, maintenance, and that stuff off the bus. The device would know better than any host how much spare energy it has got left to commit writebacks and when those are needed for best, but still perfectly safe performance.
But never forget exFAT: In reality such a scheme would be a broken mess, with the breakage being there to make sure it will only work well with Windows and Microsoft has patents to assert.