Reasons Unbeknownst

[Edit: I just got a bunch of traffic from Nvidia and Sandia labs so I'm thinking I may be on to something here]

So I was sitting here thinking about how modern RAID cards are completely inadequate when it comes to solid state hard drives (as I often do), and I had an idea. Why can’t graphics card hardware be used to accelerate software RAID? We have CUDA right?

For a second I thought I was onto something truly original but after a quick search it looks like some guys over at Sandia Labs beat me to the punch by a few months:

“One example is the RAID software developed by researchers at the University of Alabama and Sandia National Laboratory that transforms CUDA-enabled GPUs into high-performance RAID accelerators that calculate Reed-Solomon codes in real time for high-throughput disk subsystems (according to “Accelerating Reed-Solomon Coding in RAID Systems with GPUs” by Matthew Curry, Lee Ward, Tony Skjellum and Ron Brightwell, IPDPS 2008). From their abstract, “Performance results show that the GPU can outperform a modern CPU on this problem by an order of magnitude and also confirm that a GPU can be used to support a system with at least three parity disks with no performance penalty.” I’ll bet the new NVIDIA hardware will perform even better. My guess is we will see a CUDA-enhanced Linux md (multiple device or software RAID) driver in the near future.”

The problem for using this sort of tech in the consumer space is that people want to boot from their ridiculously fast RAID arrays and software RAID makes that difficult (though not impossible with Linux if you don’t RAID the kernel). If you’re using a software RAID array and the OS crashes you can lose an array.

Here’s a link to the actual paper.

Just had another idea. If a RAID driver could check for CUDA support and only use it if present then an OS could boot in a slower CPU RAID setup until the graphics drivers(CUDA) loaded at which point things would get a lot snappier.

In the future I’m going to guess we’ll see hard drives on PCI-E cards with ONFI flash chips and NO SATA PORTS. With RAID handled by some standardized version of CUDA. Operating systems will have ONFI drivers baked in. This would effectively collapse the hardware RAID industry as we know it.

SLC NAND is only going to get cheaper. I imagine we’ll see 100GB drives containing 200GBytes of NAND. 150GB for a RAID 5 array and 50GB for wear leveling. At some point diminishing returns kick it. Are we really going to need three gigabytes per second of bandwidth from our drives to open word documents?

Wikipedia on
CUDA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

ONFI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_NAND_Flash_Interface_Working_Group

I have a system of beliefs I use to view the world and it has served me pretty well in making predictions but it has a big hole. So I drive around in my theory without a complete understanding of the engine, but it gets me from point a to point b effectively.

I’m confused by the fact that something that is not really a need can have value. We pay people to make us laugh but you can’t survive on laughter despite that famous quote about medicine. I have a theory and I’m going to use ‘laughter’ in place of anything intangible that we want but don’t need that we might pay money for.

Our ability to pay for laughter is equal to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) minus something I’ll call NTNP. Necessary tangible national product. NTNP is the economic value of the production of things like food, housing, transportation, clothing. Basic necessities which are the foundation of the economy in the 3rd world but that also exist in the 1st world. The NTNP as a percentage of GDP is probably a lot higher in places like Ethiopia where people struggle to survive and don’t spend $100 a month on HBO.

So in my thought experiment GDP = NTNP + EMNP. EMNP is the reason Eddie Murphy is a fabulously wealthy comedian, it’s the value of everything produced people buy after they’ve paid for necessities. Funny people in Ethiopia probably aren’t very wealthy because in Ethiopia they eat tomatoes, we throw them.

For the sake of argument
US economy: 20% NTNP and 80% EMNP.
Mexico: 50% NTNP and 50% EMNP.
Ethiopia: 90% NTNP and 10% EMNP.

The interesting point is that even if you’re having a bad year in Ethiopia the economy will never collapse due to a lack of confidence like it can in America. Eddie Murphy National Product on the other hand is ephemeral, subject to the whims of collective grumpiness.

One of my beliefs is that accelerating technological change is squashing the middle class. When everybody is driving electric cars in ten years there will be a million or so mechanics out of work because electric cars are so much easier to maintain. That’s just one example. The newspaper business is on the brink of collapse due to the Internet, etc.

I’m going to coin a new term to describe what our middle class is facing. Schumpeter came up with creative destruction. Kurzweil has accelerating change. Mash them together and you get the ugly term Accelerating Destruction.

EMNP will continue to shrink in the future as the rich get richer. Why? Because wealthy people only have so much time to go to the movies and Olive Garden. But those businesses employ a heck of a lot of middle class people.

We need to learn to live with deflation. The number one criticism of deflation is that it strangles the economy because people stop spending and wait for things to get cheaper in the future. If that was really a problem nobody would ever buy a laptop. Fear of deflation is probably due to the knowledge that our bubble economy sat precariously atop debt funded pillar of happy thoughts.

I get the sense that policy makers know that confidence is a prerequisite (hence the blind optimism) but they don’t seem to get that the confidence was paid for with unsustainable debt.

Wealth redistribution is not technically fair in my opinion (Bastiat) but it may be the only way to prevent the complete collapse of capitalism given accelerating destruction. Someone has to keep the people paying for laughter.