Application Access to Persistent Memory – The State of the Nation(s)!

After years of anticipation, an era of new memory technology is upon us. Next Generation non-volatile memories, such as NVDIMM, and the 3D XPoint™ memory developed by Intel and Micron, offers low latency, byte-addressability and persistence. The next step is figuring out how to ensure applications can utilize these new technologies. To this end there is a large amount of activity across a range of industry bodies exploring options for providing connectivity between NG-NVM and the applications that will use it. These groups include SNIA, NVM Express, the RDMA communities including the OpenFabrics Alliance and the InfiniBand Trade Association, JEDEC, IETF and others. In addition, operating systems and programming models are being extended to align with these standards and the memories to complete the connection between NVM and application. These models extend across networks, providing storage-class deployments which support advanced resiliency and availability.

In this presentation we give a “State of the Nation(s)” overview of where we are on this path. We provide a high-level update of the work going on within the industry bodies, the OSes and the programming models. We outline some of the highlights of what has been achieved so far and discuss some of the (many) challenges that still need to be solved.