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Hi, I'm Dick Kaiser from Intel. In this video, I introduce you to Intel® Optane® DC Persistent Memory and the tools to help you use it effectively. I'll share the unique software tools we've developed to help enable this technology, and give some quick tips on how to determine whether your workloads could benefit from this new hardware.

Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory is an innovative memory technology that delivers a unique combination of speed, capacity, and persistence. It can be used in multiple ways– as large memory or fast storage, depending on the requirements of the application. VTune™ Amplifier is a widely-used performance analysis and optimization tool. We've added features and workflows to help developers understand whether Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory can benefit them, the easiest ways to take advantage of it, and how to tune an application once is successfully running on a platform with this new memory technology.

VTune amplifier helps you see how much memory your workloads are consuming, what the hardware bottlenecks are, and what is causing them. You can track access to dynamically allocated objects and visualize performance issues due to cash memory, DRAM, and, now, persistent memory as well. You can also measure memory bandwidth, disk, and PCIe traffic.

The combination of these features provides a powerful tool for enabling Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. One easy thing you can try with VTune amplifier today is identifying the memory consumption of your workload, which is a good indicator for whether Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory can provide a benefit to your application.

VTune amplifier has multiple ways to analyze memory consumption. The predefined memory consumption analysis type will track all the allocations and dislocations of an application. If the high watermark in the memory consumption analysis reveals that nearly all, or, in some cases, even more than the available DRAM is in use, it's a key indicator that the application may benefit from more memory.

The VTune amplifier platform profile or feature can track memory usage at the system level and show whether the entire system, which can include multiple applications running simultaneously, may be bound by the available DRAM memory. Some use cases, like databases, want data to persist in memory when power is lost. This can make restarting a database much faster, but only if you flush data out of the volatile caches and into persistent memory.

We've got a tool to help– Intel® Inspector now includes Persistence Inspector. It finds missing and redundant cache flushes, PMDK logging errors, and more. Deciding when and how to use persistent memory is just the first step. You may also wish to finetune its performance and validate that critical data is persistent. VTune Amplifier and Intel Inspector help you do that. Download them today and see what you can learn about your application. Thanks.