We have included the Atomic Writes

by Recent Me recentme

We have included the Atomic Writes

Like many success stories of the digital era, FortressCraft started out because someone on the internet said it couldn't be done. Three years ago, while Adam Sawkins was working at Activision's Freestyle Games studio, he had the idea for a 3D version of the brilliant but visually inaccessible fantasy simulation, Dwarf Fortress. He spent his evenings tinkering on the project, naming it DiggersWorld and slowly building an engine. But there was a problem: he just couldn't get it to render the graphics quickly enough.

Then something important happened. "I was playing Minecraft with a friend of mine, and he asked how the game's rendering worked," he recalls. "I explained about voxels, the lighting, the optimal way that facets are culled, and a little light went on in my head; I realised I could use voxels to make DiggersWorld run faster." Voxels, or volumetric pixels, are essentially building blocks from which 3D models can be calculated and displayed – they have been used for years in games, especially to create large terrains, and since the arrival of Minecraft they are back in vogue.

So back in 2011, Sawkins was reminded about voxels, opening a new avenue for his DiggersWorld project. "I didn't think much further on that until I came across a thread on the Minecraft forum with the header, 'BRING MINECRAFT TO THE XBOX360'," says Sawkins. "It was full of people saying that it wasn't possible to get a Minecraft-style game working on the console. I posted saying that it was, but you'd have to do it all multi-threaded, and take advantage of the unified memory architecture on the Xbox. But I was rebutted with the phrase, 'Lol noob, you know nothing'".

To him this wasn't a casual putdown, it was a challenge. Sawkins is an industry veteran, a self-taught coder who's worked at a series of studios, from Codemasters to Criterion. Like most programming geeks, he says, he's fascinated by maths-based tasks that involve stuff like ray-tracing and six-degrees-of-freedom movement. To him, bringing a Minecraft game to the Xbox seemed like an intriguing puzzle. So instead of just shrugging off the abuse, he spent the next three days working on a prototype construction sim, written using XNA, a set of tools designed by Microsoft to help indie coders create games for the Xbox 360. His project had basic voxel rendering, avatar rendering, networking… but when he posted some screenshots on the thread, he was immediately confronted with a predictable response: "FAKE AND GAY".

"I had to make a video on my phone," says Sawkins. "And then I uploaded it – just to get people to believe that I actually had it running. So to sum up; I wrote FortressCraft to prove someone wrong."

"A flash-aware application optimizes the placement, movement, and especially the processing of data with awareness of NAND flash in the memory hierarchy, and offers configuration options for leveraging the properties of flash memory to improve performance, manageability, and return on investment," said Pankaj Mehra, Fusion-io Chief Technology Officer. "With flash-aware applications, developers can eliminate redundant layers in the software stack, deliver more consistent low latency, more application throughput, and increased NAND flash durability, all with less application-level code. Complementing our ongoing standards work, we are pleased to make NVMKV and the Linux Demand Paging Extension available to the open source community, as Fusion-io continues to add uncommon value to common standards."

"The Open Compute Project is dedicated to promoting more openness and accelerating the pace of innovation in the development of datacenter technologies," said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the Open Compute Foundation and vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook. "Contributions like the one Fusion-io is proposing today play a crucial role in the work of opening up the datacenter, and we are excited to see what the community does with the NVKMV flash interface."

The latest releases of MySQL databases MariaDB and Percona Server deliver the option for flash-aware operation. These two popular MySQL distributions are the first enterprise applications to ship using Atomic Writes, streamlining the software stack by replacing the need to write twice to maintain atomicity, or database ACID compliance.

"Increasingly our customers expect MariaDB products to not just compete with, but to exceed what they can get from rival database technologies," said Monty Widenius, MariaDB creator. "The highly innovative solutions we have worked on with the Fusion-io Atomic Writes API are a great example of how both companies are bringing the best thinking to the best database in the world."

By enabling a processor to simultaneously write multiple independent storage sectors as a single storage transaction, Atomic Writes streamlines data writes to improve performance and extend the life of flash memory. In I/O intensive workloads, Atomic Writes provides performance throughput increases up to 50%, as well as a 4x reduction in latency spikes, compared to running the databases on the same flash memory platform without Atomic Writes. Fusion-io is also extending the general purpose Linux I/O layer to allow these mainstream file systems to make the benefits of Atomic Writes accessible to a wider variety of applications.

"Atomic Writes moves beyond redundant architectures left over from building databases for disk drive systems," said Peter Zaitsev, CEO and Founder of Percona. "Flash-aware applications streamline the software stack to extend the potential of flash beyond basic, block addressable storage. New flash-aware APIs like Atomic Writes help deliver high performance MySQL acceleration optimized for modern datacenter architectures designed around efficiency and performance. We have included the Atomic Writes API in the current version of Percona Server 5.5 as well as the upcoming Percona Server 5.6."

Demand Paging is a method for virtual memory management in computer operating systems where a data block is copied onto physical memory only if an application attempts to access it. In disk drive environments, Demand Paging is unacceptably slow, causing database developers to develop complex alternatives that add extra application code. As new MySQL and new NoSQL databases continue to gain popularity, revisiting Demand Paging in flash aware applications accelerates development by streamlining the software stack. When working set size exceeds the capacity of DRAM, flash-aware Demand Paging provides continued application performance, ensuring that performance bends but does not break. This intelligence helps to provide resources to the most critical data in flash-powered servers hosting flash-aware applications.

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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