Multi-level Hybrid Cache: Impact and Feasibility

Technical Report · Wed Feb 01 00:00:00 EST 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1035823· OSTI ID:1035823

Zhang, Zhe ^[1]; Kim, Youngjae ^[1]; Ma, Xiaosong ^[1]; Shipman, Galen M. ^[1]; Zhou, Yuanyuan ^[2]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
2. Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States)

Storage class memories, including flash, has been attracting much attention as promising candidates fitting into in today's enterprise storage systems. In particular, since the cost and performance characteristics of flash are in-between those of DRAM and hard disks, it has been considered by many studies as an secondary caching layer underneath main memory cache. However, there has been a lack of studies of correlation and interdependency between DRAM and flash caching. This paper views this problem as a special form of multi-level caching, and tries to understand the benefits of this multi-level hybrid cache hierarchy. We reveal that significant costs could be saved by using Flash to reduce the size of DRAM cache, while maintaing the same performance. We also discuss design challenges of using flash in the caching hierarchy and present potential solutions.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1035823
• Report Number(s): ORNL/TM--2010/297; KJ0502000; ERKJZN1
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
Cache management
DESIGN
PERFORMANCE
STORAGE
flash storage