Infrastructure

At FMS 2026 — the memory and storage industry’s annual conference, held in early August — NVIDIA announced it is open-sourcing the cuFile API and the storage stack beneath it into a neutral GitHub organization, XIO-SIG, with Google, Intel, and Meta as founding co-maintainers. It also formalized Storage-Next, a 40-plus-vendor coalition (Micron, KIOXIA, DDN among them), and designated SCADA — Scaled Accelerated Data Access, no relation to the industrial-control acronym — as the framework to build against. ...

I was building a GPU recommendation engine — one that maps workload descriptions to specific configurations, primary recommendations, and cost ranges — and kept hitting the same wall: getting the recommendations right meant going deep on every constraint that determines whether a deployment actually works. Not whether it’s affordable. Whether it works at all. VRAM has to fit the full training state, not just the model weights. Training data has to be where the GPUs are. The interconnect has to support the parallelism strategy. None of that shows up in a $/hr comparison. Here are the five calculations that come before it. ...