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Eideticom making waves at Open Compute Summit and NVM Express Annual Meeting!

We had a busy couple of weeks at Eideticom recently with Open Compute (OCP) Summit and the NVM Express Annual Meeting back-to-back. In this blog I wanted to fill you in on some of our activities at those two events.

Eideticom is making accelerators consumable

The idea of using accelerators to offload CPUs to improve application performance and efficiency is not a new one. However, one of the challenges for accelerators is making them easy to consume. New initiatives in Computational Storage and NVM Express for Computation aim to make accelerators much easier to consume. 

At OCP Eideticom was on a panel discussing Computational Storage. Here we chatted with other companies working on Computational Storage products and standardization. Consumability was a theme with customers demanding some commonality between accelerators from different vendors. 

Also, at OCP we were excited to do a demo on application acceleration with our partners Xilinx, AMD and DellEMC. We used the Eideticom NoLoad®Computational Storage Processor to accelerate the production key-value store RocksDB and got significant improvements in performance and efficiency.

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Using NVM Express for Computation

Making accelerators consumable means standardizing. An obvious candidate for this standard is NVM Express. It is a great standard for PCIe and Ethernet attached accelerators and applies to both the data-path and the control and management path. Obviously if a customer is consuming thousands of accelerators in their data-centers they need management!

However, NVM Express today has no concept of computation. Eideticom’s products leverage NVM Express but we would like other companies to do the same and that means expanding NVM Express. We gave a talk to the NVM Express members to raise this topic.

One of the key slides from that talk is the software stack for NVM Express Computation and that goes back to the theme of consumability. NVM Express Computation does several things when it comes to software and consumability.

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  • Since NVM Express defines a PCIe interface it means accelerators from different vendors can use the NVMe PCIe driver and not a vendor-specific one.
  • Since NVM Express has command transports for PCIe and Ethernet it can be used for direct attach accelerators and network attached accelerators with no changes to applications.
  • NVM Express has a very robust management interface and software stack. This can be used for managing accelerators as well as Non-Volatile Memory.
  • As new transports come to market NVM Express transports can be defined for them CXL for example.

Conclusion

Eideticom continues to be a leader in making accelerators easier to consume and continues to drive that effort through standards work at SNIA and NVM Express. Aligning accelerator vendors to a common interface and software stack makes it a lot easier for customers to adopt accelerators into their system and tie them to their applications. Continue to see more from Eideticom in this space!