Swanson hopes to build the second generation of the Moneta storage device in the next six to nine months and says the technology could be ready for market in just a few years as the underlying phase-change memory technology improves. The development has also revealed a new technology challenge.
"We've found that you can build a much faster storage device, but in order to really make use of it, you have to change the software that manages it as well. Storage systems have evolved over the last 40 years to cater to disks, and disks are very, very slow," said Swanson. "Designing storage systems that can fully leverage technologies like PCM requires rethinking almost every aspect of how a computer system's software manages and accesses storage. Moneta gives us a window into the future of what computer storage systems are going to look like, and gives us the opportunity now to rethink how we design computer systems in response."
In addition to Swanson, the Moneta team includes Computer Science and Engineering Professor and Chair Rajesh Gupta, who is also associate director of UC San Diego's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Student team members from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering include Ameen Akel, Adrian Caulfield, Todor Mollov, Arup De, and Joel Coburn.
