Keynote: Converging Memory and Storage

Order of magnitude advances in non-volatile memory density and performance are upon us bringing significant systems level architecture opportunities. Intel® 3D XPoint™ Memory, with much higher performance than NAND and greater density than DRAM has entered the platform to address the gap between the two. Intel® Optane™ SSDs are already available as fast storage volumes delivering significant application performance improvements to applications. Persistent Memory will take us further. With low latency and fine grained addressability this non-volatile high capacity memory is available directly, avoiding the 4kByte block size and multiple microsecond storage stack that accompany system storage. Making Persistent Memory requires a series of hardware and software advances and can be made accessible to the programmer in a number of different ways. The resulting high capacity, high performance, persistent memory creates opportunities for rethinking algorithms to deliver much higher performance applications. This presentation will explore this new memory technology, show how it fits within the platform and the resulting performance, describe the modes of operation in which it is being made available, and explore a few applications promise to benefit.