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 StorageāSSDs 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.
Related Stories
Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up To 14 GB/s
Today Marvell is announcing the first NVMe SSD controllers to support PCIe 5.0, and a new branding strategy for Marvell's storage controllers. The new SSD controllers are the first under the umbrella of Marvell's Bravera brand, which will also encompass HDD controllers and other storage accelerator products. The Bravera SC5 family of PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers will consist of two controller models: the 8-channel MV-SS1331 and the 16-channel MV-SS1333.
These new SSD controllers roughly double the performance available from PCIe 4.0 SSDs, meaning sequential read throughput hits 14 GB/s and random read performance of around 2M IOPS. To reach this level of performance while staying within the power and thermal limits of common enterprise SSD form factors, Marvell has had to improve power efficiency by 40% over their previous generation SSD controllers. That goes beyond the improvement that can be gained simply from smaller fab process nodes, so Marvell has had to significantly alter the architecture of their controllers. The Bravera SC5 controllers still include a mix of Arm cores (Cortex-R8, Cortex-M7 and a Cortex-M3), but now includes much more fixed-function hardware to handle the basic tasks of the controller with high throughput and consistently low latency.
Top-of-the-line PCIe 4.0 controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion are capable of 7.4 GB/s of sequential reads.
Related: Marvell Looking to Integrate Machine Learning Engines Onto SSD Controllers
Marvell Announces ThunderX3, an ARM Server CPU With 96 Cores, 384 Threads
Marvell ThunderX3 ARM Server CPU Will Have Up to 60 Cores Per Die, with 96-Core Dual-Die Option
Silicon Motion Launches PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Controllers
(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.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday August 16 2019, @08:56PM
I read the headline and thought why would they want to integrate Machine Learning in their comics ... Oh there is an extra L in the name ...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @08:56PM (1 child)
Why does this feel like the first step toward making the storage a copyright cop? Or did I read that wrong?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @10:58PM
My first though as well. So how long until this is mandated in all storage media?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @09:18PM
ssd+ now with 33 1/3% more malware!
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday August 16 2019, @09:29PM
So, the SSD is storage and the computer. Better put a good heat sink on the thing.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @10:23PM
i'd like a poe gigabit (or 2.5) switch (8 plus ports) and hdd and/or ssd that plug into it.
maybe add a lil blue led to each drive so it can be identified.
125 MB/sec (or 312.5 MB/sec) looks fast enough for easily expandable bulk home storage?
so talk to the drive(s) via ethernet instead of of sata or scsi or ahci? doesnt need to be tcp/ip either but would require the drive to have some smarts?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @10:25PM
That only that this would accelerate is the search for data that you don't know that you actually have.
I could see that being useful in things like meteorology and astrophysics, maybe voice recognition. But particularly I think surveillance.
Right? Because you know where you're shit is. You put it there. So why would you need to do a fuzzy search of images and audio, unless the search was being implemented by someone who doesn't have your prior knowledge? Except perhaps it will dumb down UI's even further so that people can say: "computer, show me that... er... You know, that thing I was looking at a while back.".
As if processing data for tards doesn't melt enough glaciers as it is.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday August 16 2019, @10:40PM
I was confused for a second but okay now. For a moment I thought that a Tony Stark invention had become reality.