Tom Coughlin
Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report), and puts on digital storage-oriented events. He is a regular storage and memory contributor for forbes.com and M&E organization websites. He is an IEEE Fellow, Past-President of IEEE-USA and is active with SNIA and SMPTE. For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to www.TomCoughlin.com.
Sessions
The industry has begun to reconfigure the standard memory topology, and these new configurations promise to make computing systems better than ever. Enormous pools of cache-coherent disaggregated “Far” memory will be made available to all processors, even coprocessors, and will be read and written using standard memory protocols no matter which processor accesses it. “Near” memory is set to move away from limiting DDR interfaces to support larger capacities at higher speeds while using less energy to move data around. What will this do to computing system architecture? How will it be supported? Which applications will benefit the most? Will other systems use this approach outside of the realm of supercomputers? In this session a panel of distinguished industry participants will share their sometimes-contradictory/sometimes-controversial views on these questions and more as the audience learns that there are many alternatives vying to win out in this space.