On the SC24 supercomputing convention held in November in Atlanta, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the actor who performed the Mountain in “Sport of Thrones”), dead-lifted a customized barbell weighed down by 453 kilograms (1,000 kilos) of solid-state drives (SSDs). The info saved in these drives totaled simply over 280 petabytes.
“With out query, that is probably the most knowledge lifted by a human in historical past,” says Andy Higginbotham, senior director of enterprise improvement at Phison Electronics. Excessive-performance knowledge platform Vdura orchestrated the record-breaking elevate in collaboration with Phison.
Behind this publicity stunt is an actual pattern: To feed AI’s insatiable knowledge urge for food, reminiscence drives are getting bigger, ad infinitum. Phison not too long ago introduced the most important SSD reminiscence drive to this point, storing 128 terabytes of knowledge, and piled tons of of them into Björnsson’s barbell. Inside a couple of weeks, Solidigm introduced its personal 123-TB drive. Samsung and Western Digital additionally not too long ago began carrying comparable merchandise.
The shift towards extra AI workloads in knowledge facilities has led to very power-hungry chips, principally GPUs. For the reason that general energy use in an information heart goes up, individuals are searching for methods to make use of much less energy wherever potential. On the identical time, giant language fashions and different AI fashions require ever growing quantities of reminiscence.
“You’ll be able to see the place storage necessities are going,” says Roger Corell, senior director of AI and management advertising at Solidigm. “You take a look at a big language mannequin only a couple years in the past, you had a half a petabyte per rack or decrease. And now there’s giant language fashions that pair with between three and three and a half petabytes per rack. Storage effectivity to allow continued scaling of AI infrastructure is de facto, actually essential.”
Crucially, this new crop of solid-state drives takes up the identical space in a computing rackand energy finances as their roughly 32-TB and 64-TB predecessors—though they’re barely taller—which means they are often swapped into knowledge facilities for a simple win.
3 Methods to Enhance SSD Capability
“There’s three sorts of vectors you’ll be able to innovate on to drive up capability per SSD,” says Corell. “One is the bits per cell, after which two is what number of cells are you able to pack in a single layer, and what number of layers are you able to stack of those reminiscence cells.”
The variety of bits per cell is actually what number of completely different values might be saved in a single NAND flash floating-gate transistor. These transistors are packed onto a layer with ever-increasing densities. Including extra layers does make the system taller, however, Corell says, top just isn’t a limiting think about knowledge facilities at the moment, so there may be room to increase.
Solidigm was already making 4-bit-per-cell units, so it innovated by packing extra cells per layer to go from the 60-TB mannequin to its 122-TB system, primarily by utilizing the smallest out there NAND expertise and lowering the dimensions of non-NAND elements. Phison went from 3-bit to 4-bit NAND cells, enhancing alongside all three vectors to go from its 32 TB to its 128-TB drive.
Going to the next variety of bits per cell makes the write occasions considerably slower, however that is nonetheless a win in plenty of functions, says Allyn Malventano, senior supervisor of technical advertising at Phison.
Sustaining the identical energy draw as smaller units is a high quality balancing act. “The drive builders are at all times going to must do to determine, okay, if we configure it this explicit method, possibly we will get some larger efficiency, but when we try this, it’s going to take some extra energy with a purpose to try this proper,” Malventano says. “So there’s mainly a tuning operation that goes on for any explicit capability.”
The demand for higher-capacity reminiscence drives just isn’t slowing down, both. “It’s by no means going to cease. There’s at all times going to be extra demand for bigger SSDs,” Higginbotham says. Solidigm’s Corell predicts there can be petabyte SSDs available on the market earlier than the last decade is completed.
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