NGD Systems Unveils Catalina 2 In-Situ Processing Enabled SSD

NGD Systems, Inc. (formerly NxGnData) announced the availability of a in-situ processing enabled SSD.

Capable of running advanced applications directly on the the drive using in-situ processing, the Catalina 2 is available in PCIe AIC and U.2 form factors.

“Orange, like most telecom companies, experiences unique computational demands that extend from the data center to the edge of the network,” said Jerome Laudouar, VP, infrastructure, technologies and engineering, Orange SA. “By moving compute-intensive tasks from servers to the source of the data storage, we would be able to deploy significant computational capabilities with very low power consumption to the network edge, where power is at a premium.“

In a recent demonstration of its capabilities, a facial recognition application utilizing a weightless neural network algorithm ran directly on an company’s SSD including the training phase, without needing to transfer data to the host.

“NGD Systems vision of bringing intelligence to storage is now a reality. Advanced applications like embedded artifical intelligence and machine learning, which are by nature IO intensive, can run within the storage device,” said Nader Salessi, founder and CEO, NGD Systems.

The in-situ processing platform running on an SSD will take distributed processing to the next level, by first moving computation to the edge where the data resides, and second increasing computational parallelism as storage devices are added in the system, allowing all the drives in the system to process data in simultaneously. By reducing data movement, the actual execution time for the overall application is accelerated while reducing the power consumption and heat generation.