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GCN Home > 09/11/06 issue

Eng Lim Goh | SGI’s memory of the future

Interview with Eng Lim Goh, Silicon Graphics Inc. chief technology officer

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Last spring Eng Lim Goh, chief technical officer at Silicon Graphics Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., surprised many at the annual High Performance Computing and Communications Conference when he focused on issues of computer memory (of all things) during his talk. The conference, held every year at Newport, R.I., usually doesn’t devote a lot of bandwidth to working memory. But SGI believes better use of memory could open the door to new possibilities. The company’s NUMAlink architecture allows multiple computers to join together to create one giant memory block—up to 128 terabytes’ worth. And despite SGI filing for bankruptcy last May, it continues to push the envelope in memory utilization. GCN sat down with Goh to find out more.

GCN: So, SGI has been focusing its efforts on memory management of late.

Goh: It stems from us seeing a rising concern from our government customers with the deluge of data they are getting. For various reasons, they are not able to exploit that data effectively. So what we started on is how we could leverage our current architecture to accelerate knowledge discovery.

What we did was tinker with the idea of putting an entire database in memory. NUMAlink allows multiple nodes to be tied tightly together, so that all the memory pieces are seen as one. Once the processors can see all the memory across all nodes as a single memory, then they can load a large database entirely into that memory. So a complex query that would normally take seconds to return a response—because the disk query takes some time to scan the database—could be returned in under a second. When we went out with the idea, we got enthusiastic responses. We heard how it could fundamentally change the discovery process. When you ask questions with complex queries, you sit and wait for a response. It breaks the thinking process, because you might want to converge on an idea by quickly firing off questions and getting quick responses. You want to have a conversation with the data.

GCN: What is largest block of memory you’ve shipped so far? What could all this aggregated memory be used for?

Goh: We have unclassified examples of multiterabyte systems. Thirteen terabytes is the largest we’ve shipped.

In the commercial world, NUMAlink could be used for telephone directories. If you pick up a cell phone, dial the number and press send, sometimes it takes a long time before the other end rings. That is because the system tries to search for the callee number on disk. So we are looking at a scheme where we load these terabyte-sized phone books in memory so the call-connection would become instantaneous.

More news on related topics: Software Applications, Storage Management, Content / Record Management



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