Disaggregated Memory Technology

Supercomputer Democratization - Use Case Brief

?What Is It?

Today, supercomputer levels of performance are needed by many more organizations than just governments, universities, and the military. Enterprises large and small are continuously finding new ways to improve their business value by applying more computing power to their problems, and the clouds and service providers who serve many of these enterprises are doing the same.

?In many cases the main separator between a high-performance rack of servers and something which is approaching more towards supercomputer performance is the memory architecture of individual servers. By adding a performant disaggregated memory appliance to the rack, system performance can be improved as HPC applications can use this memory rather than relying on slower network storage technologies, making the true ‘drag and drop supercomputer’ practical.

?How Does It Work?

This use case requires a cost-effective way to introduce a large amount of fast memory into the rack, which can be used by all servers within that rack as if it were their own local memory. The speed of interconnection and the size of the memory pool which can be added are key factors.

?Fast Interconnection

TORmem utilizes the fastest commercially available interconnection technologies including PCIe Gen 5, so that memory within the TORmem disaggregated memory appliance is as close as possible in performance to local memory for each of the servers within the rack. Prior to PCIe Gen 5, open standard interconnection technologies were too slow, and proprietary solutions were too expensive to enable a disaggregated memory appliance for the mass market.

?Large Memory Space

The only job of a disaggregated memory appliance is to host a large amount of RAM. As such, far more of its internal space can be used to accommodate memory modules than in a typical server where they are contending with CPUs, GPUs, and other components. This makes such an appliance much more efficient than individual servers on a fast memory per rack unit basis.

?Why TORmem?

TORmem was founded with one clear goal in mind; to bring innovative disaggregated memory technologies to market that will enable new applications, new computing system designs, and vastly improved cost efficiency and performance for customers from enterprise to hyperscale.???????????????????