Fine-Grained Data Management for DRAM/SSD Hybrid Main Memory Architecture

Abstract

SUMMARYMany data-intensive applications need large memory to boost system performance. The expansion of DRAM is restricted by its high power consumption and price per bit. Flash as an existing technology of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) can make up for the drawbacks of DRAM. In this paper, we propose a hybrid main memory architecture named SS-DRAM that expands RAM with flash-based SSD. SSDRAM implements a runtime library to provide several transparent interfaces for applications. Unlike using SSD as system swap device which manages data at a page level, SSDRAM works at an application object granularity to boost the efficiency of accessing data on SSD. It provides a flexible memory partition and multi-mapping strategy to manage the physical memory by micropages. Experimental results with a number of data-intensive workloads show that SSDRAM can provide up to 3.3 times performance improvement over SSD-swap.

Write-awareness prefetching for non-volatile cache in energy-constrained IoT device

“…In order to meet the ever-increasing demand for computing power and low power of IoT device, high storage density, near zero leakage power NVM (PCM, STT-RAM, RRAM, etc.) has been studied and tried at different levels from external memory to main memory [15,16,17]. These methods of solve the asymmetry of NVM are very valuable.…”