On the SC24 supercomputing convention held in November in Atlanta, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the actor who performed The Mountain in Sport of Thrones), deadlifted a customized barbell weighed down by 453 kilograms (1000 kilos) of strong state drives. The info saved in these drives totaled simply over 280 petabytes.
“With out query, that is essentially the most information lifted by a human in historical past,” says Andy Higginbotham, senior director of enterprise improvement at Phison Electronics. Excessive-performance information platform VDURA orchestrated the record-breaking raise in collaboration with Phison.
Behind this publicity stunt is an actual development—to feed AI’s insatiable information urge for food, reminiscence drives are getting bigger, for ever and ever. Phison just lately introduced the biggest SSD reminiscence drive thus far, storing 128 terabytes of knowledge, and piled lots of of them into Björnsson’s barbell. Inside a number of weeks, Solidigm introduced its personal 123 Tb drive. Samsung and Western Digital additionally just lately began carrying comparable merchandise.
The shift in the direction of extra AI workloads in information facilities has led to very power-hungry chips, largely GPUs. Because the total energy use in an information middle goes up, persons are in search of methods to make use of much less energy wherever attainable. On the identical time, giant language fashions and different AI fashions require ever rising quantities of reminiscence.
“You’ll be able to see the place storage necessities are going,” says Roger Corell, senior director of AI and management advertising at Solidigm. “You have a look at a big language mannequin only a couple years in the past, you had a half a petabyte per rack or decrease. And now there’s giant language fashions that pair with between three and three and a half petabytes per rack. Storage effectivity to allow continued scaling of AI infrastructure is de facto, actually necessary.”
Crucially, this new crop of solid-state drives takes up the identical space in a computing rackand energy finances as their roughly 32 Tb and 64 Tb predecessors—though they’re barely taller—which means they are often swapped into information facilities for a straightforward win.
3 Methods to Enhance SSD Capability
“There’s three sort of vectors you possibly can innovate on to drive up capability per SSD,” says Corell. “One is the bits per cell, after which two is what number of cells are you able to pack in a single layer, and what number of layers are you able to stack of those reminiscence cells.”
The variety of bits per cell is actually what number of completely different values may be saved in a single NAND flash floating-gate transistor. These transistors are packed onto a layer with ever-increasing densities. Including extra layers does make the machine taller, however, Corell says, top will not be a limiting consider information facilities at this time, so there’s room to increase.
Solidigm was already making four-bit-per-cell gadgets, so it innovated by packing extra cells per layer to go from the 60 Tb mannequin to its 122 Tb machine, primarily by utilizing the smallest accessible NAND expertise and lowering the scale of non-NAND parts. Phison went from thee-bit to four-bits NAND cells, bettering alongside all three vectors to go from its 32 Tb to its 128 Tb drive.
Going to a better variety of bits per cell makes the write occasions considerably slower, however that is nonetheless a win in a whole lot of purposes, says Allyn Malventano, senior supervisor of technical advertising at Phison.
Sustaining the identical energy draw as smaller gadgets is a wonderful balancing act. “The drive builders are all the time going to must do to determine, okay, if we configure it this explicit method, we possibly we are able to get some larger efficiency, but when we do this, it’s going to take some extra energy with a purpose to do this proper,” Malventano says. “So there’s a, mainly a tuning operation that goes on for any explicit capability.”
The demand for larger capability reminiscence drives will not be slowing down, both. “It’s by no means going to cease. There’s all the time going to be extra demand for bigger SSDs,” Higginbotham says. Solidigm’s Corell predicts there shall be petabyte SSDs available on the market earlier than the last decade is finished.
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