Memory Solutions Lab

Transforming Memory Performance

About MSL

The Memory Solutions Lab (MSL) is part of Samsung’s Memory Business Unit, the industry’s technology and volume leader in DRAM and SSD. MSL’s vision is to solve key problems & innovate new architecture platforms for Cloud & Data Center environments, and MSL is an integral part of Samsung’s worldwide R&D Labs. MSL works closely with development teams to bring feature innovation to product roadmaps, and engages with customers, partners, universities and the technology community in Silicon Valley to develop new solutions.

MSL Public Speech / Tech Blog

Is SSD with CXL interfaces brilliantly stupid or stupidly brilliant?

Tue Sep 19 | 10:40am – 11:20am

CXL has garnered increasing attention from the industry, with a predominant focus on memory expanders utilizing DRAM-based technology. However, the discontinuation of Optane and the growing demand for extensive memory in new ML models have prompted the storage and system communities to urgently seek alternative solutions. In a keynote address last year, Dr. Ki presented compelling reasons for the storage community to seriously consider CXL adoption. This year, he continues the discourse by delving into diverse NAND solutions integrated with CXL interfaces, highlighting their inherent advantages. These benefits encompass persistent memory, TCO-optimized tiered memory, high-performance small IO, data-centric computing, and more. Dr. Ki will provide in-depth discussions on practical use cases, technical challenges, and preliminary findings to enlighten the community about the immense potential of this technology. The aim is to foster awareness and understanding of the transformative capabilities of CXL-based NAND solutions. Furthermore, the presentation will cover Samsung’s collaborative efforts with eco partners to establish robust hardware and software ecosystems. By actively engaging with various stakeholders, Samsung seeks to build an inclusive and sustainable environment conducive to technological advancement and environmental stewardship.

Link to SNIA

Video

Modern enterprise and data-center workloads are all hitting the memory wall—both bandwidth and capacity walls. This has led to new memory-centric computing architectures and an industry-wide adoption of the new Compute Express Link (CXL) standard to overcome the memory capacity wall problem. This is accomplished by providing memory expansion over the PCIe physical interface via low latency cache-coherent communication protocols. To learn more, join Rekha Pitchumani, Senior Manager, Memory Solutions Lab, on Thursday, April 20th at 10:00am PT as she does a deep dive into the CXL-based Memory-Semantic SSD™, one of Samsung’s recent memory innovations. This innovation is designed to overcome the memory capacity wall using a high-performance SSD architecture with a fine-grained cache-line granular memory access interface.

Please register through the link

A Memory Technology Continuum to Be Enabled by CXL

Presenter : Yangseok Ki, VP, Samsung Memory Solutions Lab

CXL is a buzzword, but still unfamiliar to many people in the industry. In this lecture, Dr. Ki will provide an overview of CXL, focusing on the potential and limitations of behavioral characteristics learned through Samsung’s development of various CXL PoCs. In particular, he will focus on the role of CXL as a common system fabric. He will explain how CXL accelerates the convergence of memory, storage, accelerators and networks for computing and creates a new continuum of memory technology.

Video

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Why Should the Storage Community Care about CXL?

Presenter : Yangseok Ki

The exponential growth in data volume and traffic across the global internet infrastructure is motivating the exploration of new architectures for data centers to achieve the demand for better performance, efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO). One promising trend is to segregate the functional components of compute, memory, storage, and networking into pools and organize them as needed according to the specific needs of different workloads. This disaggregation and composability will take us beyond the classic architecture of servers as the unit of computing.

Backed by a broad consortium of hyperscalers, equipment OEMs, chipmakers and IP vendors, Compute Express Link (CXL) is a new enabling technology for interconnecting computing resources that embraces existing competing technologies such as Gen-Z and OpenCAPI. Currently in Gen 3.0, CXL enables high-speed, low-latency links with memory cache coherency between processors, accelerators, NICs, memory, and storage.

In this keynote, Dr. Ki would like to share the opportunities and challenges that exist across hardware and software, with a focus on Samsung’s CXL memory technologies such as CXL memory expanders and memory semantic SSDs. In particular, he will share the direction Samsung wants to move forward with the storage community and suggest various collaboration opportunities.

Link

 

Innovation with SmartSSD for Green Computing

Yang Seok Ki, Vice President and CTO

Carbon neutrality is becoming an important issue in the industry. Data centers are currently known to consume 1-2% of global electricity usage. Data centers are transforming their architecture to improve total cost of ownership (TCO). But now environmental impact is also becoming an important factor. Therefore, it can be said that green computing, which increases computational efficiency with low energy consumption, has great significance. I note that this is also a problem stemming from the traditional CPU-centric general-purpose computing model. Therefore, accelerators based on different domain-specific architectures are becoming important not only from a basic TCO point of view, but also from a green computing point of view and can be a potential solution. In particular, Samsung has been approaching these issues from the perspective of memory and storage, and has emphasized the importance of a data-centric computing as an alternative to the existing compute-centric computing.
 
This keynote will showcase the innovations Samsung is making in storage devices through the SmartSSD concept and share its long-term vision to enable power-efficient green computing through data-centric computing. We would also like to invite the industry to collaborate on realizing data-centric computing across various accelerators for more power-efficient data processing.

Evolution of Memory Devices for Edge Computing

Presenter: Dr. Sungwook (Sung) Ryu, Samsung

Computer system architecture has been changing due to new application requirements and evolution of hardware. Mainframe computer used to be a prevail solution but distributed workstations, cloud, and edge computing have been adapted. I will go over what have been driving the architecture changes and talk about the detailed requirements of edge computing. Samsung is developing memory devices for edge computing, which include Computational Storage, ZNS (Zoned Namespace) SSD, PIM (Processing In Memory), and MRAM. I will discuss how these devices can address the issues on edge computing for power, latency and form factor.

Products

2nd Gen. SmartSSD®

Publications

Open Source Contributions

KV SSD
KV SSD open source software package includes the host software that operates with KV SSD. The package includes API library, emulator, kernel device driver and performance evaluation suite called kvbench. With the package users can evaluate multiple application(e.g., RocksDB, Aerospike, etc.) performance on block device in addition to direct key-value stack performance on KV SSD.
DSS
Disaggregate Storage Solution (DSS) provides high throughput and highly scalable storage solution for AI and Analytics workload. AI/ML is not new, but innovations in ML models development have made it possible to process data at unprecedented speeds. Data scientists have used standard POSIX file systems for years, but as the scale and need for performance have grown, many faces new storage challenges. Samsung has been working with customers on new ways of approaching storage issues with object storage designed for use with AI/ML. We welcome you to join the DSS community and explore how software and hardware are evolving to allow unprecedented performance and scale of storage for Machine Learning

University Collaborations

Samsung MSL invites academic institutions and encourages to explore furthest horizons of our research. 

Collaborate with Samsung on your next research project

To foster open innovation, we actively seek collaborative partnerships to explore future opportunities in Samsung Technology. Our aim is to pioneer new memory technologies and develop value-added memory products.

MSL is collecting proposals through GRO (Global Research Outreach) Program.

Research Themes

We encourage submissions in the following research area :

Process

Recipients (2024)

University_of_Minnesota_wordmark

<New Memory Platform>
Enabling Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design for Large Language Models on CXL Memory 
Liu Liu, (PI) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Yufei Ding, (co-PI) University of California, San Diego

<New Storage for Large Machine Learning Training>
Highly Efficient Pre-Trained LLM Storage with Near-Storage Compression and CXL Memory Integration
Yue Cheng
, (PI) University of Virginia
Ali Anwar, (co-PI) University of Minnesota

Memory Solutions Lab University Program Collaborators

Industry Standards Leadership

Patents

100+ Patents every year for the last five years: 550 patents applied and 350 issued.

Samsung Memory Solutions Lab

100+

Patents Issued Every Year

Join the Team

Samsung Semiconductor advances the world’s technologies with breakthroughs in 5G, AI, cloud, edge, IoT, and autonomous vehicle technologies. At Samsung Semiconductor, we power the future.
R&D / Engineering @Samsung Semiconductor
R&D for global products happens every day in our Silicon Valley HQ. Our Engineers, Research Scientists and Design Architects are developing leading-edge technologies across consumer device and computing platform technologies. We demand the best of each other so that, together, we can design product solutions that drive impact on a Global scale. MSL focuses on memory and storage use cases for data center applications.

Make your move.

Find your passion and do your best work in an environment that encourages individuality and fosters innovation.

R&D / Engineering
@Samsung Semiconductor

R&D for global products happens every day in our Silicon Valley HQ.

Our Engineers, Research Scientists and Design Architects are developing leading-edge technologies across consumer device and computing platform technologies.

We demand the best of each other so that, together, we can design product solutions that drive impact on a Global scale.

MSL focuses on memory and storage use cases for data center applications.

Make your move.

Find your passion and do your best work in an environment that encourages individuality and fosters innovation.

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