An overview of Intel Optane technology — Shattering the I/O Bottleneck

Abstract: 
The I/O bottleneck has been a longstanding problem on computing platforms; disks are much slower than memory which is much slower than the CPU. While this is typically addressed by various forms of data and instruction caching and tiering, there remains a large gap between performance, cost, and densities of storage and main memory. We are tackling this problem head-on with IntelTM Optane technologies. The technologies use a new Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) which effectively fills the gap, and can be used in both Solid-State Drive and extended-memory applications. We introduce new metrics for evaluating performance of such fast NVM that can be used for both storage and memory applications, present results on example applications, and challenge the audience to innovate new system-level and application-level usages.