At FMS 2024, the technological necessities from the storage and reminiscence subsystem took middle stage. Each SSD and controller distributors had varied demonstrations touting their suitability for various levels of the AI knowledge pipeline – ingestion, preparation, coaching, checkpointing, and inference. Distributors like Solidigm have various kinds of SSDs optimized for various levels of the pipeline. On the similar time, controller distributors have taken benefit of one of many options launched lately within the NVM Specific normal – Versatile Knowledge Placement (FDP).
FDP entails the host offering info / hints in regards to the areas the place the controller may place the incoming write knowledge so as to cut back the write amplification. These hints are generated primarily based on particular block sizes marketed by the machine. The characteristic is totally backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working simply as earlier than with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.
Silicon Movement’s MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was introduced again in 2022. Since then, Silicon Movement has been touting the flexibleness of the platform, permitting its clients to include their very own options as a part of the customization course of. This method is widespread within the enterprise area, as we’ve got seen with Marvell’s Bravera SC5 SSD controller within the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip’s Flashtec controllers within the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs.
At FMS 2024, the corporate was demonstrating some great benefits of versatile knowledge placement by permitting a single QLC SSD primarily based on their MonTitan platform to participate in several levels of the AI knowledge pipeline whereas sustaining the required high quality of service (minimal bandwidth) for every course of. The corporate even has a trademarked identify (PerformaShape) for the firmware characteristic within the controller that enables the isolation of various concurrent SSD accesses (from completely different levels within the AI knowledge pipeline) to ensure this QoS. Silicon Movement claims that this scheme will allow its clients to get the utmost write efficiency potential from QLC SSDs with out negatively impacting the efficiency of different kinds of accesses.
Silicon Movement and Phison have market management within the shopper SSD controller market with related approaches. Nevertheless, their enterprise SSD controller advertising and marketing could not be extra completely different. Whereas Phison has gone in for a turnkey answer with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this era, and as a substitute opting to get the SSDs certified with completely different cloud service suppliers themselves), Silicon Movement is choosing a distinct method. The pliability and customization potentialities could make platforms just like the MonTitan attraction to flash array distributors.
