Violin Memory Inc.

Gear Six, Inc.

Matthias Oberdorfer

Martin Patterson

A method and apparatus of providing high performance and highly scalable storage acceleration includes a cluster node-spanning RAM disk (CRD) interposed in the data path between a storage server and a computer server. The CRD addresses performance problems with applications that need to access large amounts of data and are negatively impacted by the latency of classic disk-based storage systems. It solves this problem by placing the data the application needs into a large (with respect to the server's main memory) RAM-based cache where it can be accessed with extremely low latency, hence improving the performance of the application significantly. The CRD is implemented using a novel architecture which has very significant cost and performance advantages over existing or alternative solutions.

Method and apparatus for providing high-performance and highly-scalable storage acceleration

A reliable and scalable system and method of broadcasting information to other computer nodes in a communication network requires only O(2) time steps. According to one aspect, after broadcasting data in O(1) steps to all nodes in the network, the system and method provides a distributed reliability protocol to ensure data delivery which only requires an additional O(1) steps. Therefore, unlike in prior art approaches where the root or co-root is responsible for the reliable data delivery, each node in the network takes on responsibility to deliver the message to a partner/neighborhood node. The broadcasting method and system of the can be used as building block for most collective/distributive operations, and provides a significant performance advantage in parallel computer systems that have multicast/broadcast capabilities.

Reliable and fast method and system to broadcast data

A method and system allows for fast compression and decompressing of data using existing repetitive interleaved patterns within scientific data (floating point, integer, and image). An advantage of the method and system is that it is so fast that it can be used to save time due to a lower amount of data transferred/stored in scenarios like network transfer, disk or memory storage, cache storage or any other real-time applications where time plays a crucial role.

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Menlo Park, CA, United States of America

Matthias Oberdorfer