[Info-vax] OT: Steve Wozniak

[Neil Rieck]

Followup Remarks:

People who know me also know that I am a supporter and contributor of
folding at home.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/folding_at_home.html

More than three year ago, researchers at Stanford worked with ATI and
NVIDIA to move Stanford's molecular analysis algorithms onto PCIe-
based graphics cards which (depending upon the price) typically
contain up to 800 streaming processors and 2 GB of their own memory.
Since these cards are PCIe-based, they sit on the northbridge bus and
can be accessed very quickly by the CPU(s).

Then this year I learned about the fusion-io SSD which is also PCIe
based. The fact that we don't need to send a signal to a remote RAID
controller or SAN means we can enjoy a speedup in the order of 2 to 3
orders of magnitude. (I don't need to remind anyone here that disk
data is only available when the desired data is under the drive's
head; discs spin and heads step; discs may seem fast to us but are a
joke when compared to the wait time endured by modern multi-core CPUs
while waiting for database data -OR- hard-faulting inside their
virtual memory subsystems)

   ###

But some of you have asked me privately if I would be interested in
using SSD on my OpenVMS system and my answer is "no, not at this
time". Why you may ask?

ANSWER: I run a AlphaServer-DS20e which includes two CPUs, 3 GB of
memory, and a RaidArray 3000 connected to 24 spindles. We only have
120 telnet users (which don't ever connect at the same time) and also
run ten Apache instances. Our databases are based upon RMS-ISAM rather
than something SQL-based. This means that a majority of our databases
are sitting in the XFC (extended file cache) of main memory because
our processes only need 1 GB. For us, adding memory was painless
because we do our own maintenance and were able to purchase third-
party 1 GB kits for ~ $700 (it would be a lot cheaper today). For our
application, having our database cached in main memory would be just
as fast as running a SSD system electrically close to the CPU.

On the flip side, I know there are other people in this newsgroup
running bigger databases while supporting more transactions per second
which means you may need SSD now.

But the dice have been thrown and we all have been given a glimpse of
the future.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/