LastingNVCache: A Technique for Improving the Lifetime of Non-volatile Caches

Conference · Wed Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2014

OSTI ID:1143559

Mittal, Sparsh ^[1]; Vetter, Jeffrey S ^[1]; Li, Dong ^[1]

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1. ORNL

Use of NVM (Non-volatile memory) devices such as ReRAM (resistive RAM) and STT-RAM (spin transfer torque RAM) for designing on-chip caches holds the promise of providing a high-density, low-leakage alternative to SRAM. However, low write endurance of NVMs, along with the write-variation introduced by existing cache management schemes may significantly limit the lifetime of NVM caches. We present LastingNVCache, a technique for improving lifetime of NVM caches by mitigating the intra-set write variation. LastingNVCache works on the key idea that by periodically flushing a frequently-written data-item, the next time the block can be made to load into a cold block in the set. Through this, the future writes to that data-item can be redirected from a hot block to a cold block, which leads to improvement in the cache lifetime. Microarchitectural simulations have shown that LastingNVCache provides 6.36X, 9.79X, and 10.94X improvement in lifetime for single, dual and quad-core systems. Also, its implementation overhead is small and it outperforms a recently proposed technique for improving lifetime of NVM caches.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• Sponsoring Organization: SC USDOE - Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1143559
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

Non-volatile memory (NVM)
device lifetime
intra-set write variation
microarchitectural technique
wear-leveling
write-endurance