Re: "Drives"
From:
From: "Adapting to Thrive in a New Economy of Memory Abundance", Kirk M. Bresniker, Sharad Singhal, and R. Stanley Williams, Hewlett Packard Labs - IEEE Computer 2015/12, pp 44-53:
Simultaneous adoption of massive NVM pools unifying storage and main memory, centimeter-scaling photonics, application-specific computation acceleration, and relegation of I/O to peripheral interfaces could indicate a fundamental shift in information processing that harkens back to Turing. With today’s emphasis on cheap computation, scarce volatile memory, and abundant nonvolatile I/O storage, systems must constantly manage data flow into and out of memory. The application code provides the translation mechanisms between the efficient, dense in-memory representation and the serialized, buffered persistent or communication representation, while the OS maintains application state and mediates hardware resources. Without the state provided by the OS and application code, the in-memory representations are meaningless. Data must be computed to be useful, but what happens when a vast in-memory representation lives much longer than the now ephemeral computation? Data might need to carry its own metadata and be packaged with its own applications and OSs. As with Turing’s universal machine, the heart of the new machine will be memory, with demonstrably correct access to data in perpetuity. Given that this concept of computing could be the catalyst for many profound insights, we have christened it Memory-Driven Computing. Having emancipated memory from computation and made it the centerpiece of computing, how do we guarantee its correctness? Augmenting the interfaces to memory with a state-change mechanism based on a functional language could provide a formally provable evolution of data without side effects as well as a self-describing type system to guarantee continuity of data interpretation. Adding strong cryptography and a capabilities-based permission system could give future generations the confidence that our information legacy is trustworthy.
Image of the Future Memory Hierarchy