SSP: Eliminating Redundant Writes in Failure-Atomic NVRAMs via Shadow Sub-Paging

Appeared in Proceedings of the 52nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-52).

Abstract

Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) technologies are closing the performance gap between traditional storage and memory. However, the integrity of persistent data structures after an unclean shutdown remains a major concern. Logging is commonly used to ensure consistency of NVRAM systems, but it imposes significant performance overhead and causes additional wear out by writing extra data into NVRAM. Our goal is to eliminate the extra writes that are needed to achieve consistency. SSP (i) exploits a novel cache-line-level remapping mechanism to eliminate redundant data copies in NVRAM, (ii) minimizes the storage overheads using page consolidation and (iii) removes failure-atomicity overheads from the critical path, significantly improving the performance of NVRAM systems. Our evaluation results demonstrate that SSP saves overall write traffic by up to 46%, reduces extra NVRAM writes in the critical path by up to 90% and improves transaction throughput by up to 64%, compared to a state-of-the-art logging design.

Publication date:
October 2019

Authors:
Yuanjiang Ni
Jishen Zhao
Heiner Litz
Daniel Bittman
Ethan L. Miller

Projects:
Storage Class Memories
Operating Systems Support for NVM

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{ni-micro19,
  author       = {Yuanjiang Ni and Jishen Zhao and Heiner Litz and Daniel Bittman and Ethan L. Miller},
  title        = {{SSP}: Eliminating Redundant Writes in Failure-Atomic {NVRAMs} via Shadow Sub-Paging},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 52nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-52)},
  month        = oct,
  year         = {2019},
}