Visualization and data reordering using EcoRAM

Background

EcoRAM is a new product from Spansion. One of its goals is to fill the very large performance gap between DRAM and conventional (and solid state) disks. Its main competitor in this market place is Fusion IO. Its four most relevant claimed advantages are: $\frac{1}{8}$ power use of conventional DRAM; four times the memory per DRAM slot; $2-10$x write speed advantage over conventional disk and solid state drives; and most importantly, read speeds on the same order of magnitude as conventional DRAM (1.3 GB/s vs 4-6GB/s). The first claim, though important, would not make it a worthwhile investment at the University level. The last three claims were of more interest to us. Two commonly run applications at SEP, visualization and data transposition, are extremely IO bound for large data sizes.