Storage As Fast As Rest of the System

Abstract

Ultra-low latency, high endurance SSDs are poised to enter the market, based on 3D XPoint™ memory. Here we show that for these new SSDs and modern platforms, storage latency is equally divided between the SSD and the rest-of platform. We summarize some of the recent system level optimizations that make this possible. Such low latency storage offers a potential for applications to use storage as a resource in place of memory. We describe a few examples of use case analyses that we have undertaken. Finally we comment on use of 3D XPoint memory accessed as system memory rather than storage.