Meeting new technologySSD, PCI Express, InfiniBand

INSIGHT TECHNOLOGY

TOMOE IZUMIYA

CHAPTER 1

Meeting SSD

Solid-state drive (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

A solid-state drive (SSD), sometimes called a solid-state disk or elec-tronic disk, is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block I/O hard disk drive. SSDs are distin-guished from traditional magnetic disks such as hard drives (HDDs) or floppy disk, which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads. In contrast, SSDs use microchips that retain data in non-volatile memory chips and contain no moving parts. Compared to electromechanical HDDs, SSDs are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, have lower access time and la-tency, but are more expensive per gigabyte (GB). SSDs use the same in-terface as hard disk drives, thus easily replacing them in most applica-tions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

• Data reading speed is fast(about 100 to 700 times faster compared to HDD)

Able to shorten the time to transfer huge data!

Reduce woking hours -> can have free time or go home early!

(improve PC performance -> improve work efficiency)

• Lower power usage

• Susceptible to physical shock and silent

TOMOE IZUMIYA

What about SSD?Well, some of the things I was able to recognize like CPU, or mother board, etc. BUT! there are so many parts I’ve never seen before! I even don’t have a clue what they are used for...

While I was looking through those items I found our colleague was wearing a white glove walking pass by. Let’s start with asking him what he is doing!

“What are you doing with that white glove on your hand?”“I’m working on assembling the fastest hardware and why am I wear-ing this glove? That’s because I don’t want to ruin anything by static electricity or putting any finger prints on.”“Hmmm.... And what is that chocolate bar lying on the desk?”“Yes, the chocolate bar. I was planning to eat it for my break....Noooo! it’s a storage device called SSD!! This is.....”

Hmmm...He is really a nice person and explained to me a lot about SSD, but I think it was too much for me. So I’ll just summarize the things I’ve understand!

As far as I’ve studied there are so many advantages in using SSD! BUT too bad, it’s not perfect...

■smaller volume and still bit expensive compared to HDD (but getting cheaper these days)

■if the disk gets full it causes the performance to slow down.■when free block is full to write -> first have to erase and then rewrite. This makes the writing speed to slow down.■flash memory has a limit in lifetime.

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Recently, I’ve noticed that there was a small factory? (kind of) created in our office.

Now, let’s see what’s inside SSD.

I can see that it’s small but can’t tell which is what...Oh, but I can’t find the magnetic disk like HDD! That’s why it’s susceptible to physical shock and doesn’t make noise as much as HDD. So, the black things lined up are called the chips and this works as a storage.(some of you might be familier if I call it NAND flash memory chip.)And small DRAM (might not exist in some cases).

DRAM is also a flash memory but the difference is in case of a power loss all the data will be lost.

Don’t get upset! DRAM only wants to store the data temporarily so you wouldn’t have any problem using it.

Then the memory controller.This part controls everything such as reading/writing data and transfer-ring information to your computer.This decides the performance of SSD.

I think that’s all for SSD!

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CHAPTER 2

Meeting InfiniBand&PCI Express

InfiniBand (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Its features in-clude high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable. The InfiniBand architecture specification defines a connection between processor nodes and high performance I/O nodes such as storage devices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand

PCI Express (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion bus standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards. PCIe has numer-ous improvements over the aforementioned bus standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance-scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-plug functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard sup-port hardware I/O virtualization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

SECTION 1

InfiniBand&PCI ExpressIt’s going to look like this if you actually connect things together.

** set the card to the mother board in server side (PCI Express slot) and insert the cable di-rectly to the card. The ca-ble will be connected to a switch or to another server.

The following table shows the data transfer types. (most of you might be familiar with this but it’s very important to know!)

1X, 4X, 12X : data transfer rate increases by bundling InfiniBand cables to 1, 4, or 12.

“By the way, what does PCI Express do? I saw it written on the mother board when setting InfiniBand card.”

“Wow, you noticed that? Well this is also important to transfer data in high speed.

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Again! I’ve found something which I haven’t seen before.

Well, it says InfiniBand....I wonder what this is....now let’s figure out about this next!

“Is this cable InfiniBand?”

“No, no, no, no, no. This card, cable, switch all called InfiniBand”

“Okay, so how will this all connected to?”

“Well, let me explain you a little bit about that...”

Card Cable Switch

First of all InfiniBand cable is like a LAN cable which you see almost every-where. That’s the only thing I’ve learned so far!

But compared to a LAN cable the data transfer speed is way faster.

Using a LAN cable the speed is about 1Gbps on the other hand, InfiniBand cable is 40 times (40Gbps) faster.

Just looking at the numbers doesn’t really make sense to me, but I did un-derstand that it’s extremely fast.

SDR DDR QDR FDR

1X 2.5 Gbit/s 5 Git/s 10 Git/s 14 Git/s

4X 10 Git/s 20 Git/s 40 Git/s 56 Git/s

12X 30 Git/s 60 Git/s 120 Git/s 168 Git/s

You’ve already learned that data transfer rate is really fast by using In-finiBand, but that’s only for transferring the data between the servers. So even though transfer between the servers is fast, it doesn’t mean anything if the servers side (inside) cannot keep up with the speed. Now, this leads us to why we need PCI Express.”

“Hmmm...I got it. It’s like this! Person A is a person who is really fast in delivering the information. Person B is the person who is supposed to gather the information and hand it over to person A. If person B is tak-ing a lot of time to gather the information and hand it over, it will slow down the entire process.”

“Well it’s bit different, but I think that would be enough for now to just get an image. And PCI Express also has different types to remember.”

Okay, it’s like this!

Same as InfiniBand, PCI Ex-press can also bundle the slots by 4, 8, or 16 to make data transfer speed faster. For exam-ple, transfer speed could be 40Gbps by using x8 in simplex!

By the way, PCI Express 3.0 (called Gen3 for Generation 3) will be way faster (twice the speed).

As you could see from the picture the length of the slot is different with x4 and x12. Easy to find out which to set your InfiniBand card to by just looking at it!

Well, now I know that it is possible to combine InfiniBand and PCI Ex-press to create your own fastest hardware. You could choose, arrange, and/or test as much as you want to figure out the perfect environment to satisfy your needs!!

First I’ve learned about SSD, then InfiniBand and finally PCI Express.

Now that I know that by combining those three technology will make the most powerful and the fastest hardware in the world!

I guess I’ve just studied very, very beginning of hardware technology...

Anyway, I’m getting interested in how to make the fastest hardware and how to make it work efficiently.

Let me see.....Okay, just rap up this one first and get working on the next step. BUT! before that I need to take a break to cool down a bit!

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