SSDs bring a different set of assumptions to the table than spinning hard drives. What would an OS designed from the ground up in the world of SSDs and the cloud look like?
The next great performance challenge may be the so-called "memory wall" wrt the performance of CPUs vs the performance of RAM. Id be curious to see what that would do to performance if it underwent the same dramatic improvement as nonvolatile storage.
The possibilities that could be opened up by having a terabyte or more of extremely fast non volatile storage attached by a bus as large as you care to make it directly on top of a CPU are mind boggling.
Then when you consider that you can use them as FPGAs for computation instead and dynamically reconfigure them... wow.
Memristors are only a year or two away from commercial availability, though it will probably be a while after that until they live up to the hype. We live in exciting times.
The talk:
1. no doubt latency etc are much better for RAM.
I wager it would look mostly the same. The reason I say this is because there would still be a distinction between the CPU's memory, the system memory, and then "disk". So long as the IO hierarchy exists, I wager the OS design would more or less be the same.
Now, when memristors come about which have compute+massive memory, then we will need a new OS.
Amazon S3 pricing starts at $0.125 per GB per month. So if you just want to store an extra 500 GB that's gonna run $62.50 per month on a HDD!
Given SSDs are 5-10X more expensive who would be willing to pay $300-$600 per month?
Serious question: Any S3 users out there who would pay 5X as much for better performance? If so, what are you working on?