VizWorld.com

If you swing by the NVidia booth at SIGGRAPH you’ll see one major eye catching feat:  A single workstation driving 12 full HD displays with uncompressed 1080P video simultaneously, thanks to the NVidia QuadroPlex 7000 and FusionIO.

“Working with Fusion-io, we’ve created an impressive, large-scale visualization technology demonstration at SIGGRAPH for show attendees,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “By combining Fusion’s ioMemory technology with our powerful QuadroPlex 7000, we’re demonstrating how to enable real-time color correction and processing of a dozen simultaneous uncompressed HD video streams – without being bottlenecked by disk speeds.”

In addition, you can head over to the Autodesk, Thinkbox, and Tweak booths to see similar demonstrations: Massive datasets being processed real-time thanks to the mind-blowing bandwidth available in the FusionIO SSD system.

All the details after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware autodesk, fusionio, nvidia, siggraph, thinkbox, tweak

Over at the RenderStream Blog they have a discussion with Vincent Brisebois of FusionIO on the use of SSD’s in Compositing work.  They cover the benefits of using SSD as disk-cache, to improve performance on cached renders, but then get into a less-frequently discussed aspect of SSD’s.

RS: In a recent interview you gave on CG channel, you mention that before you started using your solid state memory cards, you were never able to fully utilize your Quadro FX card. Can you elaborate on that? How do the GPU’s and the Fusion-io cards relate to each other and when does it make sense to buy another GPU or assemble an SLI?

VB: This is an interesting case. Before the Fusion-io cards, I never had enough data throughput to saturate my CPU and GPU. Even with a 4 drive Sata RAID, you only have four reading heads (one per disk), so if you have a 20 layer comp, you aren’t able to feed 20 frames simultaneously to the CPU. With SSD technology you can feed hundreds of images simultaneously, allowing you to easily “feed” the CPU. With the CPU now at 100% utilization, you can quickly process the images and render a result which then goes to the GPU to display. With a four drive raid, I could realistically work on 1080p footage pretty well, but stereoscopic 2K was impossible and 4K was just a pipe dream.

In the interest of fairness I feel the need to point out that Vincent Brisebois works for FusionIO, a well-known SSD manufacturer, and RenderStream builds high-end workstations, so they both have something to gain by pushing more SSD’s in the industry.  However, they both make very good points.

As prices continue to plummet on SSD technology, I think we are really heading for a world where Hard Drives are the equivalent of modern Tape Drives: Slow but Huge and Reliable storage.

via Solid State Flash Memory For Compositing « RenderStream.com.

Hardware fusionio, ssd

Visualization, whether it is artistic, conceptual, informational, or scientific, involves creating and moving around a lot of data. We have covered Fusion-io in the past simply because it looks like great technology that can be used in that process. Fusion-io makes solid-state drives (SSD) that fits into a x16 PCI Express 2.0 slot. The beauty of using a x16 PCI Express 2.0 slot is that it enables Fusion-io to obtain a higher bandwidth.

Fusion-io has recently announced the availability of its new ioMemory module. By using the latest in MLC NAND Flash, they are able to double the capacity of its products. This gives them the ability to have up to 1.28 terabytes (TB) of capacity. But capacity is not everything. This latest memory also allows them to have 285,000 sustained IOPS with under 25 microseconds latency.

via : Fusion-io Delivers Next-Generation ioMemory Module

Hardware fusionio, ssd

The new 2.5 TB ioDrive Octal from Fusion-io was recently displayed at Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon. The ioDrive is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x16 PCI Express 2.0 slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express 2.0 slot is that Fusion-io can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can saturate a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot with their new Octal. The Octal can deliver a bandwidth of 6.4 GBytes/sec. It accomplishes this by using 1,600 flash dies. Samsung is the provider of the memory chips, and is also an investor in Fusion-io. With that many chips, one might wonder how Fusion-io handles the inevitable chip failures. To see how they handle that, let’s take a look at a simpler ioDrive.

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Hardware commercial, feature, fusionio, sc09

HotHardware got its hands on the new Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD solutions, and ran them through a nice benchmark suite.  The results are still being processed, but they had this to say already:

It’s true, your eyes do not deceive you. You’re looking at a product that offers 300MB/sec average write throughput and 750 – 800MB/sec of average read throughput. We’re going to strap on a drool bib and get back to testing these bad boys a bit more. RAID 0 anyone? Stay tuned!

via Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD Sneak Peek! – HotHardware.

Hardware fusionio, ssd, storage

Last month (August 14th), we published a feature story from Paul Adams about the ioXTreme card from FusionIO.  From his article:

The new 80 GB ioXtreme from Fusion-io was recently displayed at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, LA. The ioXtreme is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x4 PCI Express slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express slot is that you can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can achieve a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 280 MB/s.

While those number match the performance data given to us in Phone Interviews and the DataSheet they handed out at SIGGRAPH (We still have it, & verified it), FusionIO contacted me today requesting a correction.

• Read Bandwidth    697 MB/s (64 KB packets)
• Write Bandwidth      288 MB/s (64 KB packets)

The changes have been integrated into Paul’s original article, go check it out for details on the fastest SSD solution on the market.

Hardware feature, fusionio, storage

The new 80 GB ioXtreme from Fusion-io was recently displayed at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, LA. The ioXtreme is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x4 PCI Express slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express slot is that you can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can achieve a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 280 MB/s.  The best SSD for a performance comparison is the 64 GB Intel X-25E. The Intel SSD achieves a write bandwidth of 170 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 250 MB/s. The price for the X-25E is currently running about $700. The ioXtreme is favorably priced at $895.

The ioXtreme is meant for home gaming systems, which means there are some limits to the drive. The ioXtreme is limited to 64-bit Windows operating systems. That means a home user can only use 64-bit Windows XP or Vista. (If you are using 64-bit Windows XP for gaming, you need to have your head examined.)

Another limitation is that you can only RAID two of the drives together. This is a limit that is enforced by the driver. It is meant to keep people from putting several of these drives together to compete with the enterprise offerings from Fusion-io. The ioDrive and the ioDriveDuo are their enterprise offerings. These drives offer higher performance, support 64-bit Linux, and have a 3 year warranty. Meanwhile the ioXtreme comes with a 1 year warranty.

There are internal differences as well between the ioXtreme and their enterprise offerings. While it is unlikely that you will lose a chip on the ioXtreme, should that occur, you will lose your data. On the enterprise side, the ioDrives have more memory chips than needed.  If a memory chip fails internally on the ioDrives, they have hardware that will detect the failure, and use one of the spare chips instead. Fusion-io claims that the ioDrives have a lifespan of 16 years, while the ioXtreme will have a shorter lifespan. For all its  increased performance, engineering, and warranty, the enterprise ioDrives comes with an increased price that starts at $3,600 for the 80GB model.

Update 9/17/09: I was recently contact by FusionIO requesting a correction on some of the data in this article.

• Read Bandwidth    697 MB/s (64 KB packets)
• Write Bandwidth      288 MB/s (64 KB packets)

And a short statement:

Though gamers will see incredible performance improvements using the ioXtreme, the market that will likely find the device most useful are content creators, digital media artists and other workstation users. Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, manipulating massive files, ripping multiple DVDs and installing a new application — all simultaneously.

Hardware feature, fusionio, siggraph

Fusion IO is at SIGGRAPH showing off their 320GB Solid-State IO Card.  I talked to them for a few minutes, and got some info on how the card works.

One common problem you hear about alot from other SSD systems is the problem of “silent failures”.  As the cells die in the SSD chips, eventually you lose the ability to write data to them.  Even with the best parity & error checking systems, it’s possible that groups of cells can fail at a time and result in bad reads.  FusionIO has addressed this problem on several fronts:

• They’ve implemented a RAID controller into the chip so that reads & writes are dispersed among several chips, improving bandwidth and reducing the number of writes required to a single chip
• 11-bit Parity for error checking
• “Real Only” checking. In the event that a portion of the memory dies, that section becomes “Read Only”, allowing safe reads of your data back for backup.

It’s an impressive card, but not cheap.  Currently selling for approximately $30/Gig , it’s not for the faint of heart.  SSD prices are falling fast, and showing up in more and more systems so things like the FusionIO will become more prevalent (and cost-conscious) in the near future.

Hardware fusionio, siggraph, storage