Using Memory-style Storage to Support Fault Tolerance in Data Centers

Appeared in Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Cool Topics in Sustainable Data Centers (CoolDC'16).

Abstract

Next-generation nonvolatile memories combine byte- addressability and high performance of memory with nonvolatility of disk/flash. They promise emerging memory-style storage (MSS) systems that are directly attached to the memory bus, offering fast load/store ac- cess and data persistence in a single level of storage. MSS can be especially attractive in data centers, where fault tolerance support through storage systems is critical to performance and energy. Yet existing fault tolerance mechanisms, such as logging and checkpointing, are designed for slow block-level storage interfaces; their design choices are not wholly suitable for MSS. The goal of this work is to explore efficient fault tolerance techniques that exploit the fast memory interface and the nature of single-level storage. Our preliminary exploration shows that, by reducing data duplication and increasing application parallelism, such techniques can substantially improve system performance and energy consumption.

Publication date:
March 2016

Authors:
Xiao Liu
Qing Yi
Jishen Zhao

Projects:
Storage Class Memories

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{liu-cooldc16,
  author       = {Xiao Liu and Qing Yi and Jishen Zhao},
  title        = {Using Memory-style Storage to Support Fault Tolerance in Data Centers},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Cool Topics in Sustainable Data Centers (CoolDC'16)},
  month        = mar,
  year         = {2016},
}