Stanford Exploration Project Selects Spansion EcoRAM Solution to Dramatically Reduce Processing Time
SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Spansion Inc. (Nasdaq: SPSN), the world's largest pure-play provider of Flash memory solutions, today announced that the Spansion(R) EcoRAM(TM) Solution is delivering a 60X performance improvement to the oil and gas industry for visualization and other read-intensive applications. The Stanford Exploration Project recently selected the Spansion EcoRAM solution to reduce the processing time of multi-Terabyte datasets and for the first time make visualization of half a Terabyte (512 Gigabytes) datasets possible from typical x86 servers.
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The Spansion EcoRAM Solution is designed to enable very high density main memory of up to half a Terabyte in today's standard x86 servers with low power consumption and high performance. By delivering up to eight times the memory capacity of typical x86 servers, Spansion EcoRAM solution-enabled servers are capable of storing vast amounts of data close to the CPU to enable high-speed processing. The solution, a flash memory based DRAM alternative, is ideally suited for use with 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,' said Robert Clapp, senior research engineer of Geophysics, Stanford Exploration Project, 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 visualization and data reordering applications is the architecture of today's x86 server with disk storage and DRAM main memory. The size of datasets are well beyond the supported DRAM memory capacity in typical servers. Applications that need to read data randomly, rather than sequentially, are very inefficient in a disk to DRAM processing scheme. With the Spansion 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 need to constantly write intermediate volumes to disk but instead do real-time processing and visualization.
