The new EcoRAM Solution is designed to allow very high density main memory of up to half a Terabyte in standard x86 servers with low power consumption and high performance. By offering up to eight times the memory capacity of usual x86 servers, the new EcoRAM solution-enabled servers are able to store vast amounts of data close to the CPU to allow high-speed processing. The new solution, a flash memory based DRAM alternative, is perfectly suited for use with the read-intensive applications like visualization and modeling for the oil and gas Industry.

The Spansion EcoRAM solution is a breakthrough memory architecture for our read-intensive applications like visualization and data transpose, stated Robert Clapp, senior research engineer of Geophysics, SEP, Stanford University. A step in the processing flow that would normally take 22 hours to complete using the standard disk to DRAM architecture can now be performed in 22 minutes using the Spansion EcoRAM solution. We’re seeing performance improvements approaching two orders of magnitude better than our existing system. It’s quite impressive.

The performance bottleneck for the visualization and data reordering applications is the architecture of new x86 server with disk storage and DRAM main memory. The size of datasets is well beyond the supported DRAM memory capacity in usual servers. Applications that require to read data randomly, rather than sequentially, are very inefficient in a disk to DRAM processing scheme. With the new EcoRAM solution, large amounts of data can be can be loaded in main memory and continually accessed without going back to disk. In the future, researchers hope to move beyond the requirement to constantly write intermediate volumes to disk but instead do real-time processing and visualization. The new EcoRAM solution presents the first technology that has the potential to make this a reality.

The Stanford application is a great example of how the Spansion EcoRAM solution can be harnessed to provide breakthrough levels of performance that are resulting in significant benefits to end users, stated Jan Silverman, vice president, Server Solutions Business Unit, Spansion. Beyond the system level performance increases, the Spansion EcoRAM solution enables up to a 4X server consolidation in the data center which translates into a significant total cost of ownership savings.

The SEP is planning to issue a report to the SEP sponsors companies on the applicability of the new EcoRAM solution to the oil and gas industry, additionally to using the platform in its own research.

General Availability of the new EcoRAM Solution:

The new Spansion EcoRAM solution is available with capacities up to 512GB per server. The systems with the new solution are available from Appro.

Leveraging technology like the Spansion EcoRAM solution will allow Appro to meet the high capacity main memory needs of high performance computing customers while providing cost-effective solutions using standard x86 platforms, stated Daniel Kim, chief executive officer of Appro. We are excited to be partnering with Spansion and offering two-socket or four-socket systems with the Spansion EcoRAM solution.

Additionally, Virdient System’s GreenCloud server line will utilize the new EcoRAM Solution for applications in Internet Data Centers. The new EcoRAM solution is compatible with a large number of 64-bit Linux applications. The new EcoRAM Solution can also be utilized for read-intensive applications in areas like analytics, bioinformatics, business intelligence, government, internet, and oil and gas or can be utilized as a drop-in augmentation for hadoop clusters.

About New Spansion EcoRAM Memory:

The new Spansion EcoRAM memory supports read latencies in hundreds of nanoseconds, which is competitive with the server DRAM latencies. By comparison, this is 10,000X faster than hard disk drives and up to 100X faster that solid state drives. Read bandwidth reaches up to 2.2 gigabytes per second (GB/s) or over 20x compared to typical 100 Megabytes a second (MB/s) enterprise-class hard disks. Write performance for a new EcoRAM system compares to high-speed enterprise-class hard disks which are in the hundreds of MB/s.