patent lawsuit from pirate Blackbird against #Cloudflare and #Fastly #patents
on 02017-07-11“Non-volatile storage: Implications of the Datacenter’s Shifting Center”, an ACM Queue #paper claiming that now #Flash “storage-class memories” of US$3000 to US$5000, such as NVDIMMs, provide durable #memory #hardware that is fast enough to saturate one or more fast CPUs, thus invalidating the assumptions that have underlain our memory hierarchy designs in computer systems ever since semiconductor RAM beat out ferrite cores in the early 1970s. They still only support about 100k IOPS though (or 400k for sequential or read-only workloads). and they still cost 25× as much as spinning rust #disks. (The massive Flash storage speed advantage is basically how #Fastly works.) It argues that now optimizing cost-performance requires us to be willing to let CPUs idle in order to keep the Flash beast fed, not vice versa, since the cost of the Flash rather than the CPU now drives the overall cost of the system. So, for example, maybe you should busywait on your Flash instead of using interrupts.
on 02016-01-06