Lukas Werling, Yussuf Khalil, Peter Maucher, Thorsten Gröninger, Frank Bellosa

DIMES'23, 1st Workshop on Disruptive Memory Systems, Koblenz, Germany, October 23, 2023

Persistent memory (PM) provides advantages such as direct access from the CPU at low latency, but it turned out that its performance is sensitive to certain access patterns. Particularly, the access latency increases when the PM is under parallel load. This leads not only to degraded PM performance, but slows down the entire system and wastes energy due to busy, but stalling CPUs. We propose an efficiency metric for measuring the CPU cost of a PM storage system. We evaluate our metric and the power consumption of existing file systems and explore PM-optimized memory copy routines to improve their efficiency. Finally, we propose an alternative system design where access to PM is mediated by an FPGA while allowing selective user space access to files.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{10.1145/3609308.3625265,

author = {Werling, Lukas and Khalil, Yussuf and Maucher, Peter and Gröninger, Thorsten and Bellosa, Frank}, title = {Analyzing and Improving CPU and Energy Efficiency of PM File Systems},
year = {2023},
isbn = {9798400703003},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3609308.3625265},
doi = {10.1145/3609308.3625265},

abstract = {Persistent memory (PM) provides advantages such as direct access from the CPU at low latency, but it turned out that its performance is sensitive to certain access patterns. Particularly, the access latency increases when the PM is under parallel load. This leads not only to degraded PM performance, but slows down the entire system and wastes energy due to busy, but stalling CPUs. We propose an efficiency metric for measuring the CPU cost of a PM storage system. We evaluate our metric and the power consumption of existing file systems and explore PM-optimized memory copy routines to improve their efficiency. Finally, we propose an alternative system design where access to PM is mediated by an FPGA while allowing selective user space access to files.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Disruptive Memory Systems}, pages = {31–37}, numpages = {7}, location = {<conf-loc>, <city>Koblenz</city>, <country>Germany</country>, </conf-loc>}, series = {DIMES '23} }