7.5 Reliable and Persistent: From Cache to File system

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Date: Wednesday 27 March 2019
Time: 14:30 - 16:00
Location / Room: Room 5

Chair:
Chengmo Yang, University of Delaware, US

Co-Chair:
Alexandre Levisse, EPFL - ESL, CH

This session integrates both hardware and software optimizations aiming at enhancing reliability and performance of non-volatile caches and main memory. The first paper proposes a novel cache design to completely eliminate the accumulation of read disturbances in STT-MRAM without compromising cache performance. The second paper makes adaptive page migration decisions between DRAM and NVRAM as workload changes and hot/cold pattern varies. The third paper aims to reduce write amplification caused by frequently-updated inodes in journaling file systems, while maintaining crash consistency using persistent memory.

TimeLabelPresentation Title
Authors
14:307.5.1(Best Paper Award Candidate)
ENHANCING RELIABILITY OF STT-MRAM CACHES BY ELIMINATING READ DISTURBANCE ACCUMULATION
Speaker:
Hossein Asadi, Sharif University of Technology, IR
Authors:
Elham Cheshmikhani1, Hamed Farbeh2 and Hossein Asadi1
1Sharif University of Technology, IR; 2Amirkabir University of Technology, IR
Abstract
Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) as one of the most promising replacements for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories benefits from higher density and scalability, near-zero leakage power, and non-volatility, but its reliability is threatened by high read disturbance error rate. Error-Correcting Codes (ECCs) are conventionally suggested to overcome the read disturbance errors in STT-MRAM caches. By employing aggressive ECCs and checking out a cache block on every read access, a high level of cache reliability is achieved. However, to minimize the cache access time in modern processors, all blocks in the target cache set are simultaneously read in parallel for tags comparison operation and only the requested block is sent out, if any, after checking its ECC. These extra cache block reads without checking their ECCs until requesting the blocks by the processor cause the accumulation of read disturbance error, which significantly degrades the cache reliability. In this paper, we first introduce and formulate the read disturbance accumulation phenomenon and reveal that this accumulation due to conventional parallel accesses of cache blocks significantly increases the cache error rate. Then, we propose a simple yet effective scheme, so-called Read Error Accumulation Preventer cache (REAP-cache) to completely eliminate the accumulation of read disturbances without compromising the cache performance. Our evaluations show that the proposed REAP-cache extends the cache Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) by 171x, while increases the cache area by less than 1% and energy consumption by only 2.7%

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15:007.5.2UIMIGRATE: ADAPTIVE DATA MIGRATION FOR HYBRID NON-VOLATILE MEMORY SYSTEMS
Speaker:
Duo Liu, College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, CN
Authors:
Yujuan Tan1, Baiping Wang1, Zhichao Yan2, Qiuwei Deng1, Xianzhang Chen1 and Duo Liu1
1Chongqing University, CN; 2University of Texas Arlington, CN
Abstract
Byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (NVRAM) combines the benefits of DRAM and flash memory. Its slower speed compared to DRAM, however, makes it hard to entirely replace DRAM with NVRAM. Hybrid NVRAM systems that equip both DRAM and NVRAM on the memory bus become a better solution: frequently accessed, hot pages can be stored in DRAM while other cold pages can reside in NVRAM. This way, the system gets the benefits of both high performance (from DRAM) and lower power consumption and cost/performance (from NVRAM). Realizing an efficient hybrid NVRAM system requires careful page migration and accurate data temperature measurement. Existing solutions, however, often cause invalid migrations due to inaccurate data temperature accounting, because hot and cold pages are separately identified in DRAM and NVRAM regions. Based on this observation, we propose UIMigrate, an adaptive data migration approach for hybrid NVRAM systems. The key idea is to consider data temperature across the whole DRAMNVRAM space when determining whether a page should be migrated between DRAM and NVRAM. In addition, UIMigrate adapts workload changes by dynamically adjusting migration decisions as workload changes. Our experiments using SPEC 2006 show that UIMigrate can reduce the number of migrations and improves performance by up to 90.4% compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

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15:307.5.3REDUCING WRITE AMPLIFICATION FOR INODES OF JOURNALING FILE SYSTEMS USING PERSISTENT MEMORY
Speaker:
Xianzhang Chen, Chongqing University, CN
Authors:
Chaoshu Yang, Duo Liu, Xianzhang Chen, Runyu Zhang, Wenbin Wang, Moming Duan and Yujuan Tan, Chongqing University, CN
Abstract
Conventional journaling file systems, such as Ext4, guarantee data consistency by writing in-memory dirty inodes to block devices twice. The write back of inodes may contains up to 90% clean inode that is unnecessary to be written back, which caused severe write amplification problem and largely reduce performance since the size of an inode is several times less than the size of a basic unit for updating the block device. Emerging persistent memories (PMs), such as STT-RAM, provide the possibility for storing the offset of inodes in memory persistently. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme, Updating Frequency based Inode Aggregation (UFIA), to reduce the write amplification of dirty inodes using PM. The main idea of UFIA is to identify the frequently-updated inodes and reorganize them in adjacent physical locations on block device. Firstly, UFIA adopts NVM as an inode mapping table for remapping logical inodes to any physical inodes. Second, we design an efficient algorithm for UFIA to identify and reorganize the frequently-updated inodes. We implement UFIA and integrate it into Ext4 (denoted by UFIA-Ext4) in Linux kernel 4.4.4. The experiments are conducted with widely-used benchmark Filebench. Compared with original Ext4, the experimental results show that UFIA significantly reduces the write amplification of inodes and improves 40% of performance on average.

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16:00End of session
Coffee Break in Exhibition Area



Coffee Breaks in the Exhibition Area

On all conference days (Tuesday to Thursday), coffee and tea will be served during the coffee breaks at the below-mentioned times in the exhibition area.

Lunch Breaks (Lunch Area)

On all conference days (Tuesday to Thursday), a seated lunch (lunch buffet) will be offered in the Lunch Area to fully registered conference delegates only. There will be badge control at the entrance to the lunch break area.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Thursday, March 28, 2019