PCM-Based Durable Write Cache for Fast Disk I/O

Conference · Sun Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2012

OSTI ID:1050382

Liu, Zhuo ^[1]; Wang, Bin ^[1]; Carpenter, Patrick ^[1]; Li, Dong ^[2]; Vetter, Jeffrey S ^[2]; Yu, Weikuan ^[2]

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1. Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
2. ORNL

Flash based solid-state devices (FSSDs) have been adopted within the memory hierarchy to improve the performance of hard disk drive (HDD) based storage system. However, with the fast development of storage-class memories, new storage technologies with better performance and higher write endurance than FSSDs are emerging, e.g., phase-change memory (PCM). Understanding how to leverage these state-of-the-art storage technologies for modern computing systems is important to solve challenging data intensive computing problems. In this paper, we propose to leverage PCM for a hybrid PCM-HDD storage architecture. We identify the limitations of traditional LRU caching algorithms for PCM-based caches, and develop a novel hash-based write caching scheme called HALO to improve random write performance of hard disks. To address the limited durability of PCM devices and solve the degraded spatial locality in traditional wear-leveling techniques, we further propose novel PCM management algorithms that provide effective wear-leveling while maximizing access parallelism. We have evaluated this PCM-based hybrid storage architecture using applications with a diverse set of I/O access patterns. Our experimental results demonstrate that the HALO caching scheme leads to an average reduction of 36.8% in execution time compared to the LRU caching scheme, and that the SFC wear leveling extends the lifetime of PCM by a factor of 21.6.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• Sponsoring Organization: ORNL work for others; SC USDOE - Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1050382
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTERS
DATA
LIFETIME
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
SIMULATION
STORAGE