A
new storage industry consortium, the Gen-Z consortium with members from AMD,
ARM, Broadcom, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),
Huawei, IDT, Mellanox Technologies Ltd., Micron, Samsung, Seagate, SK Hynix and
Xilinx announced a scalable computing interconnect and networking protocol
called Gen-Z.
The
flexible high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer
interconnect that allows efficient and cost-effective processing of vast
amounts of new unstructured data that will be generated by the Internet of
Things, real-time processing demands and other emerging applications. This
consortium is part of a bigger effort with other industry groups to create an
open-data center architecture for the future.
Gen-Z
provides the following benefits:
•
High Bandwidth, Low Latency: Simplified interface based on Memory Semantics,
scalable from tens to several hundred GB/s of bandwidth, with sub-100 ns
load-to-use memory latency
•
Advanced Workloads and Technologies: Enables data centric computing with
scalable memory pools and resources for real time analytics and in-memory
applications. Accelerates new memory and storage innovation.
•
Compatible and Economical: Highly software compatible with no required changes
to the Operating System. Scales from simple, low cost connectivity to highly
capable, rack scale interconnect.
There
are many developments going on to use emerging non-volatile higher performance
solid-state memories such as 3D XPoint, RRAM, MRAM and other technologies as
part of a memory hierarchy that will bit between flash memory and on-board
system memory. Many of these approaches will allow fabrics allowing networked
pools of non-volatile memory. It will be interesting to see how Gen-Z fits into
this overall development as more details about this technology are revealed.
Tom
Coughlin consults and writes on digital storage and applications. He is
chairman of the Storage Visions, Creative Storage Conferences as well as the
Flash Memory Summit, tomcoughlin.com
