A view of the internals of the Moneta storage array with phase change memory modules installed. Photo: UC San Diego |
A Univ. of California, San Diego faculty-student
team is about to demonstrate a first-of-its kind, phase-change memory solid
state storage device that provides performance thousands of times faster than a
conventional hard drive and up to seven times faster than current state-of-the-art
solid-state drives (SSDs).
The device was developed in the Computer Science
and Engineering department at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and
will be on exhibit at DAC 2011, with the support of several industry partners,
including Micron Technology, BEEcube, and Xilinx. The storage system, called
“Moneta,” uses phase-change memory (PCM). PCM is faster and simpler to use than
flash memory.
Moneta marks the latest advancement in solid state
drives (SSDs). Unlike conventional hard disk drives, solid state storage drives
have no moving parts. Today’s SSDs use flash memory and can be found in a wide
range of consumer electronics such as iPads and laptops. Although faster than
hard disk, flash memory is still too slow to meet modern data storage and
analysis demands, particularly in the area of high performance computing where
the ability to sift through enormous volumes of data quickly is critical.
Examples include storing and analyzing scientific data collected through
environmental sensors, or even web searches through Google.
“As a society, we can gather all this data very,
very quickly—much faster than we can analyze it with conventional, disk-based
storage systems,” said Steven Swanson, professor of Computer Science and
Engineering and director of the Non-Volatile Systems Lab (NVSL). “Phase-change
memory-based solid state storage devices will allow us to sift through all of
this data, make sense of it, and extract useful information much faster. It has
the potential to be revolutionary.”
PCM memory chips
To store data, the PCM memory chips switch the alloy between a crystalline and
amorphous state based on the application of heat through an electrical current.
To read the data, the chips use a smaller current to determine which state the
chalcogenide is in.
Moneta’s custom-built “Onyx” phase-change memory module. Image: UC San Diego |
Moneta uses Micron Technology’s first-generation
PCM chips and can read large sections of data at a maximum rate of 1.1
gigabytes per second and write data at up to 371 megabytes per second. For
smaller accesses (e.g., 512 B), Moneta can read at 327 megabytes per second and
write at 91 megabytes per second , or between two and seven times faster than a
state-of-the-art, flash-based SSD. Moneta also provides lower latency for each
operation and should reduce energy requirements for data-intensive
applications.
A glimpse at computers of the future
Swanson hopes to build the second generation of the Moneta storage device in the
next six to nine months and says the technology could be ready for market in
just a few years as the underlying phase-change memory technology improves. The
development has also revealed a new technology challenge.
“We’ve found that you can build a much faster
storage device, but in order to really make use of it, you have to change the
software that manages it as well. Storage systems have evolved over the last 40
years to cater to disks, and disks are very, very slow,” said Swanson. “Designing storage systems that can fully leverage technologies like PCM
requires rethinking almost every aspect of how a computer system’s software
manages and accesses storage. Moneta gives us a window into the future of what
computer storage systems are going to look like, and gives us the opportunity
now to rethink how we design computer systems in response.”
