Ditching RAM may lead to low-cost supercomputers

[AdminX]

"MIT researchers may have a much more affordable approach in the future, though. They've built a server network that drops RAM in favor of cheaper and slower flash storage, yet performs just about as well."

http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/12/mit- ... _truncated

More detailed information located here:
https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/cutting ... -data-0710

[matthewlai]

"MIT researchers may have a much more affordable approach in the future, though. They've built a server network that drops RAM in favor of cheaper and slower flash storage, yet performs just about as well."

http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/12/mit- ... _truncated

More detailed information located here:
https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/cutting ... -data-0710

It's an interesting idea - essentially using RAM as last-level cache.

It would only work for some applications, though. There are many high performance computing applications that are memory-bound, and they need to have large datasets in memory at all times (and won't access the disk anywhere near 5% of the time).

They are describing streaming applications where data is read and used only a few times. For this kind of applications their architecture works well. But these applications, if written well, don't need much RAM anyways.