On the SC24 supercomputing convention held in November in Atlanta, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the actor who performed The Mountain in Recreation of Thrones), deadlifted a customized barbell weighed down by 453 kilograms (1000 kilos) of strong state drives. The information saved in these drives totaled simply over 280 petabytes.
“With out query, that is essentially the most knowledge lifted by a human in historical past,” says Andy Higginbotham, senior director of enterprise improvement at Phison Electronics.
Behind this publicity stunt is an actual pattern—to feed AI’s insatiable data appetite, reminiscence drives are getting bigger, endlessly. Phison just lately announced the most important SSD reminiscence drive up to now, storing 128 terabytes of information, and piled lots of of them into Björnsson’s barbell. Inside a couple of weeks, Solidigm announced its personal 123 Tb drive. Samsung and Western Digital additionally just lately began carrying related merchandise.
The shift in direction of extra AI workloads in knowledge facilities has led to very power-hungry chips, principally GPUs. For the reason that total energy use in a knowledge middle goes up, persons are in search of methods to make use of much less energy wherever potential. On the identical time, large language models and different AI models require ever growing quantities of reminiscence.
“You may see the place storage necessities are going,” says Roger Corell, senior director of AI and management advertising and marketing at Solidigm. “You take a look at a big language mannequin only a couple years in the past, you had a half a petabyte per rack or decrease. And now there’s giant language fashions that pair with between three and three and a half petabytes per rack. Storage effectivity to allow continued scaling of AI infrastructure is admittedly, actually essential.”
Crucially, this new crop of solid-state drives takes up the identical space in a computing rackand energy funds as their roughly 32 Tb and 64 Tb predecessors—though they’re barely taller—that means they are often swapped into knowledge facilities for a straightforward win.
3 Methods to Increase SSD Capability
“There’s three type of vectors you’ll be able to innovate on to drive up capability per SSD,” says Corell. “One is the bits per cell, after which two is what number of cells are you able to pack in a single layer, and what number of layers are you able to stack of those reminiscence cells.”
The variety of bits per cell is actually what number of totally different values will be saved in a single NAND flash floating-gate transistor. These transistors are packed onto a layer with ever-increasing densities. Including extra layers does make the gadget taller, however, Corell says, peak will not be a limiting consider knowledge facilities at the moment, so there’s room to increase.
Solidigm was already making four-bit-per-cell units, so it innovated by packing extra cells per layer to go from the 60 Tb mannequin to its 122 Tb gadget, primarily by utilizing the smallest accessible NAND know-how and lowering the scale of non-NAND elements. Phison went from thee-bit to four-bits NAND cells, bettering alongside all three vectors to go from its 32 Tb to its 128 Tb drive.
Going to the next variety of bits per cell makes the write occasions considerably slower, however that is nonetheless a win in a number of functions, says Allyn Malventano, senior supervisor of technical advertising and marketing at Phison.
Sustaining the identical energy draw as smaller units is a nice balancing act. “The drive builders are at all times going to need to do to determine, okay, if we configure it this specific method, we possibly we will get some larger efficiency, but when we try this, it’s going to take some extra energy as a way to try this proper,” Malventano says. “So there’s a, principally a tuning operation that goes on for any specific capability.”
The demand for larger capability reminiscence drives will not be slowing down, both. “It’s by no means going to cease. There’s at all times going to be extra demand for bigger SSDs,” Higginbotham says. Solidigm’s Corell predicts there will probably be petabyte SSDs in the marketplace earlier than the last decade is completed.
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