[Beowulf] SSD caching for parallel filesystems

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On Feb 11, 2013, at 7:29 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

>> 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.

Yeah well i remember negotiating about writing CUDA code for  
simulation software of something similar.

Don't think that this example applies. You want it in RAM for a  
proper simulation :)