SNIA Highlights New Smart Data Accelerator Interface Specification 

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 17, 2023 --  The newly released Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) Specification v1.0 is a standard for a memory-to-memory data mover and acceleration interface.

The benefits of this new specification include:

• Data movement between different address spaces, including user address spaces located within different virtual machines.
• Data movement without mediation by privileged software once a connection has been established.
• An interface and architecture that can be abstracted or virtualized by privileged software to allow greater compatibility of workloads or virtual machines across different servers.
• A well-defined capability to quiesce, suspend, and resume the architectural state of a per-address-space data mover to allow “live” workload or virtual machine migration between servers.
• Mechanisms to enable forward and backward compatibility across future specification revisions. Allows interoperability between software and hardware designed to different specification revisions.
• Ability to incorporate additional offloads in the future, leveraging the architectural interface.
• Concurrent Direct Memory Access (DMA) model to support parallel operations for high performance.
• A PCI Express (PCIe) device model is described in the specification and the interface can be extended to other device models.

“Using software to perform memory copies has been the gold standard for applications performing memory-to-memory data movement or system memory operations,” said Shyam Iyer, Chair of the SNIA SDXI Technical Work Group. “With new accelerators and memory types enriching the system architecture, the release of the SDXI v1.0 Specification provides the framework for standardization of accelerator-assisted memory data movement and transformation.”

About SDXI

The SDXI specification was developed by the SDXI Technical Work Group, comprised of 89 individuals representing 23 SNIA member companies. Click here to download the complimentary version of the SDXI v1.0 specification.

About SNIA

SNIA is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of member companies spanning the storage market. As a recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise worldwide, SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards, and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement, and security of information.

Source: SNIA