skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

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

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1050382

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 Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
Work for Others (WFO); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
DOE Contract Number:
DE-AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1050382
Resource Relation:
Conference: International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, Washington DC, DC, USA, 20120807, 20120807
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English