Over on the SLURM list we recently had a very good discussion on swap space and job suspension. I commented that for large memory systems we should be seeing tiered RAM devices by now.
I had a look at the Intel pages on Optane memory. It is definitely being positioned as a fast file cache, ie for block oriented devices. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-optane-technology.html I mentioned Diablo Technologies, who I think have gone out of business. They had available a DRAM form-factor high capacity memory device using flash. This worked by tiering RAM memory - ie a driver in the Linux kernel would move little used pages to the slower but higher capacity device. I though the same thing would apply to Optane, but it seems not. Can anyone comment? I do not expect anyone under NDA to comment of course. I have probably said this on many forums - we are seeing the trend to wards higher and higher memory systems, which enable more detailed meshes, bigger models and in-memory databases. But do we need huge amounts of expensive and fast DRAM to do this? _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
