SK Hynix Receives Innovation Oscar for Next-Generation Storage Device 'KV-CSD'

Received 'IT/Electrical Category Award' at the '2023 R&D 100 Awards'

On the 16th (local time), SK Hynix announced that its technical team received the 'IT/Electrical Award' at the '2023 R&D 100 Awards' held in San Diego, California, USA, for their contribution to the development of the next-generation storage device, the 'Key-Value Computational Storage Device (KV-CSD)'.

The R&D 100 Awards is a science and technology awards ceremony that annually selects 100 technologies and products that have achieved the greatest innovations worldwide. It is called the 'Oscar of Innovation' in academia and industry.

KV-CSD of SK Hynix, the first in the industry to apply indexing technology, and a controller supporting data computation / [Photo by SK Hynix Newsroom]

KV-CSD is a product jointly developed by SK Hynix and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the United States. SK Hynix was responsible for developing the KV-CSD, while LANL worked on developing the system to apply KV-CSD to supercomputers.

This product demonstrates fast read performance capable of processing petabyte (PB)-scale large data within minutes, and it quickly analyzes data through its own computation, attracting attention in the field of high-performance computing (HPC).

SK Hynix applied the world's first 'Indexing' technology to KV-CSD, dramatically increasing the speed of data retrieval. According to the company, KV-CSD is up to 7.4 times faster than existing storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSD).

Jung Woo-seok, head of the Computational Storage team at SK Hynix, said, "KV-CSD is a next-generation storage device that quickly processes and analyzes data, then delivers only the desired results to the central processing unit (CPU). It will be useful not only for high-performance computing but also for artificial intelligence (AI) and big data industries that handle large-scale data." He added, "We will focus on commercialization going forward and strive to ensure its use in various fields."