Los Angeles (CA) – Want to be the envy of every digital animator and movie producer in a thirty mile radius?  At the Siggraph convention in Los Angeles, Texas Memory Systems is showing off a massive rack tower with 64 TB of high-speed flash memory.  The rack can perform 800,000 input/output instructions per second and runs on just 2.5 kilowatts of power.  Total bandwidth on this beast is 12 GB/s.

The rack’s construction is actually quite simple.  Eight RamSan-500 units are stacked in the rack and those do 100,000 IOPS and 1.5 GB/sec each.  Each RamSan box has 16 to 64 gigabytes of DDR cache memory to buffer the flash RAM.  The flash modules are stored in pop-out “drives” and are in a redundant array.  In fact, just before we walked up to the booth, another attendee pulled out one of the drives without warning.  The company spokesman said all the data was still safe, but added that it would take approximately 10 – 15 minutes to rebuild the array.

According to company reps, these systems are used in intermediate rendering and movie projects along with mega transactional databases.  These boxes would be too expensive to use as permanent memory.

Imagine running ZBrush on this bad boy

Aug 14, 2008 01:38     

I wonder if this is the direction that we're going.
Thomas Goddard report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Cost?

Aug 14, 2008 06:39     

I wonder what that costs?
Dr. Marbles report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

cost?

Aug 14, 2008 08:39     

It is probably one of those 'if you have to ask, you can not afford it' prices. :)
TomLeeM/BigWarpGuy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

2.5 KW?

Aug 14, 2008 10:45     

2.5 KW... not that much power when you consider that graphics cards are going to catch that next month at the rate they're going. sarcasm.end();
Jim L report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

re:2.5kw

Aug 14, 2008 21:07     

It is not alot when u consider the average energy hogging american uses 10kwhr
mtotho report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0