During the last two decades, the data center world has been moving to a “Software Defined Everything” paradigm. This has been taken care of mostly by hypervisors running on the x86 up to recently.

This talk will show that using carbon footprint as a common metric to assess a set of computing equipment allows straightforward comparison of technologies and designs on a “performance per carbon” basis, bringing together operational (energy use inputs) and scope 3 (production & materials inputs) carbon, along with workload-aligned performance metrics to compare technologies and systems.

CXL has garnered increasing attention from the industry, with a predominant focus on memory expanders utilizing DRAM-based technology. However, the discontinuation of Optane and the growing demand for extensive memory in new ML models have prompted the storage and system communities to urgently seek alternative solutions. In a keynote address last year, Dr. Ki presented compelling reasons for the storage community to seriously consider CXL adoption.

Software-Enabled Flash™ is a new storage paradigm engineered as a vendor neutral Linux Foundation project. This technology is dedicated to delivering the full power and flexibility of software-definable flash to developers. It is built on a hardware architecture focused on low-level flash management and abstraction, combined with an open-source, host-based software stack optimized for data placement control, latency prioritization, and protocol creation. Hardware from KIOXIA implementing this new Software-Enabled Flash technology will be sampling soon with select customers.

One of the goals of HPE’s Spaceborne Computer program is proving the value of edge computing. Spaceborne Computer-1 (SBC-1) was launched in August of 2017 with the latest available COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) hardware, including twenty solid state disks (SSDs) for storage. The disappointing durability of those SSDs will be covered; the Failure Analysis (FA) of them upon Return To Earth (RTE) will be presented and the mitigation done in Spaceborne Computer-2 will be detailed. HPE’s Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) launched in February of 2021 with over 6 TB of internal SSD storage.

Welcome remarks by J Michel Metz, Chair and Executive Committee, Technical Director, AMD