Liqid adds memory extension tech to composable system

Liqid’s composable systems can now compose up to 16TB of Liqid Memory, enabling larger applications to reduce IO and execute much faster.

A composable system dynamically sets up a virtual server to run application workloads by pulling compute, memory, FPGA, storage and networking capabilities from a resource pool. When the server’s job is finished component resources are returned to the pool for re-use.

Liqid Memory is a DRAM and multiple NVMe SSD combination turned into virtual memory by ScaleMP’s vSMP MemoryONE software

This produces software-defined memory that can transparently replace or expand DRAM for memory-intensive applications,, according to ScaleMP. The company has written its own memory management unit to map application and system DRAM accesses to the virtual memory space which includes capacity from the NVME SSDs. The technology works without operating system or application modification.

The upshot is that more of an application’s working set executes in virtual memory and runs faster than when operating in a smaller pure DRAM memory pool with data fetched from SSDs or disk. Prefetch algorithms help achieve near-DRAM performance.

Liqid said Liqid Memory is suited for in-memory databases, including Oracle TimesTen and In-Memory Column Store, SAP HANA, DB2 BLU, Apache Spark, Aerospike DBS, and other memory-intensive applications.

Liqid Memory is available as a PCIe Add-In Card (Element LQD3900), U.2 (Element LQD3925x) drive, or within a Dell appliance with two Xeon Scalable processors and up to 12TB system memory.

Element LQD3900 PCIe add-in-card.

The LQD3900 uses an Optane SSD – as detailed in the spec sheet.

High-end, multi-socket servers can support 12TB or so of memory but low-end and mid-range ones do not. Liqid Memory is a way of giving them access to a larger pool of memory.