Playing by the rules of the game designed for traditional CPU and peripheral storage architectures leave today’s multi-processor systems waiting on I/O processes and “starving for data,” effectively minimizing the number of transactions capable of being performed by even the fastest hardware. Deploying a software approach that enables data to persist on storage media provisioned from DDR and NAND-based memory resources across multiple CPU sockets enables greatly improved performance and in-memory storage capacity, say experts at venture-backed startup Formulus Black.
Traditional systems were designed to be synchronous and uniform with processes performed in unison to the “ticks and tocks” of the CPU clock. Traditionally, there is a tradeoff whereby local memory access provides low-latency, high-bandwidth performance while trying to access memory physically residing on other CPU sockets increases latency and reduces performance.
To overcome these limitations, Formulus developed Forsa to operate on a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture. This architecture allows Forsa to pool and provision memory resources across multiple physical CPU sockets on a single system as high-performance storage devices for the most I/O intensive and latency sensitive applications. By pooling memory across CPUs on a server in this way, Forsa enables larger datasets and application to run in memory than would otherwise be possible on the same server hardware.
“NUMA is a shared memory architecture used in today’s multiprocessing systems that attempts to address the shared memory issue by providing separate memory for each processor, avoiding the performance hit when several processors attempt to address the same memory,” said Pradeep Balakrishnan, head of software development at Formulus Black. “By breaking the inherent rules through a software solution like Forsa, we can enable larger in-memory workloads to run on a single system and at the same time further increase performance-of I/O intensive workloads like OLTP and HTAP databases.”
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About Formulus Black
Formulus Black develops Forsa, a technology that is unlocking the power of in-memory compute for all applications, delivering a level of performance unmatchable by any SSD or other I/O-bound technology. Our software enables memory to be easily and efficiently used as a high-performance storage media. Forsa can be used to power the most demanding application workloads and for developers seeking to minimize latency, maximize throughput, and scale without performance loss. For more information and to trial our software, please visit: https://www.formulusblack.com
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