Special Report on SNIA Persistent Memory Summit 2020

The 2020 SNIA PM Summit (PM for Persistent Memory) was the 8th conference, the first one was initiated in 2013 under the name NVM Summit and renamed PM Summit in 2017.

As a developer conference, the event never attracted lots of sponsors except a few confidential very big ones very involved in the activity. This year we noticed Intel, MemVerge and Smart Modular Technologies. For this edition organizers told us it reached around 400 attendees for 460 registrations, pretty good number for this kind of advanced technical event.

Among the interesting agenda and sessions, we noticed these few ones: of course the keynote presented by Andy Betcholsheim, this one was fast, Andy Rudoff about the programming model, MemVerge, CXL, Oracle and Twitter.

We invite readers to check the agenda page for presentations.

Also as Intel is very active in the domain as it publishes a book titled Programming Persistent Memory available as paper or free as download.

To boost education, adoption and vendors interaction, The SNIA SSSI organizes some hackathon. Oh by the way, it was the last event where we listened to and read the acronym SSSI (Solid State Storage Initiative) judged probably too narrow. A new name is under definition.

Bechtolsheim, Arista Networks, delivered an unique keynote titled The Evolution of Cloud-scale Storage from iSCSI to RoCE to NVMexpress over Ethernet to NVMexpress over TCP/IP with full of information and insisted on disaggregated storage architecture for cloud-like deployments.

Rudoff summarized various iterations of the programming model with PMDK and DAX.

CXL (Compute Express Link) is a new consortium with members like Alibaba, AMD, ARM, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. The idea of CXL is to create a new breakthrough high-speed CPU-to-Device and CPU-to-Memory interconnect designed to accelerate next-gen data center performance. The CXL specification 1.1 is available now to members.

The event was pretty well summarized by MemVerge presentation title Memory at Storage Scale, Storage at Memory Speed. Charles Fan, CEO, promoted a memory-converged infrastructure and explained its product’s interesting approach with a memory hypervisor, a prem-native distributed file system and a prem-native distributed memory system exposing respectively a storage and a memory API. The product, currently available with a early access program, should be GA around 3Q20.

Oracle took a session and personally I had some doubt about their participation. I was wrong as it was one of the best of the day with a very accessible and progressive content. The presentation was about the impact of PM for Exadata and the impressive gain since the v1 with 40x for scan rate and 320x for read IO/s. The company leverages Intel Optane EC Persistent Memory coupled with RoCE at 200Gb/s able to reach end-to-end 19μs maximum.

We anticipate the multiplication of PMEM products, so the need for a standard API is fundamental for adoption for applications developers.