Fusion I/O uses Flash for Caching HPC & Workstations
August 2012 – At Siggraph, Fusion I/O was showing their new PCIe interface card that uses MLC Flash to create a cache for graphics operating software (called the IOFX card). Available now in a 420GB or 512GB configuration (with retail pricing starting at $2495USD) the board is targeted at accelerating large data tasks with a high IOP memory store.
One of the keys is that the board does require and management software to run it is simply a PCIe plug in board that is placed in the system on the opposite side of the CPU but just as closely as the Video / GPU compute cards. The board has been designed with a direct NAND to PCIe interface that used an SDK for the end application to simply call the card as a RAM extension.
Designed for use as a scratch pad memory for large multi-GB objects (multiple layers, video clips, texture files, etc) that are needed for scene assembly and rendering, it allows systems to have a high throughput despite the limitation of only 8-24GB of DRAM connected per CPU. In workstations the device is configured as a block device fitting into the memory system and adds directly to the memory address space. Based on configuration, the device can also be partitioned as a “RAM” drive like a hard drive with either the default 4K block size or traditional 512 block size.
The solution’s SDK has already been integrated into several industry standard tools from Autocad, AJA, Pixar’s Renderman, and Adobe. With the AJA platform, it has an integration with the KONA cards and video storage to help increase the throughput for transcode and encode of the data. The product is available now from suppliers of HPC workstations such as ProMax, HP, Dell, Next Computer and Supermicro. The card supports both multi-CPU and Multi-GPU caching for high performance in both traditional software and the newer GPU compute requirements.
