[Beowulf] SSD caching for parallel filesystems

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

> In any event, your original statement used to be wholly correct.   
> It has
> changed to a certain degree to "SSDs are about IOPs," which isn't 
> quite the same thing.  However, more pointedly, with modern HDDs 
> barely approaching 200MB/s and SSD solutions approaching 2-4GB/s, this 
> is an increasingly limited viewpoint.  We have to start considering 
> their use for bandwidth.

Find me an application that needs big bandwidth and doesn't need massive storage.



Digital waveform recording and playback.. e.g. in radar simulators.  You need very wide bandwidth, but not a huge amount of storage (e.g. If I'm playing back a synthetic response to a 1 millisecond pulse with 2 GHz BW, I only need 10s of Megasamples at most, but you need 10 Gsample/second sorts of bandwidth)

One might thing, heck, just slap a few GByte of RAM in there and be done with it, but if you're simulating a radar with 10 different pulse types, and you have 10-20 simulated targets each with several different viewing aspects, you pretty quickly need a "library" of several thousand pulses/returns to choose from.