A study of application performance with non-volatile main memory

Abstract

Attaching next-generation non-volatile memories (NVMs) to the main memory bus provides low-latency, byte-addressable access to persistent data that should significantly improve performance for a wide range of storage-intensive workloads. We present an analysis of storage application performance with non-volatile main memory (NVMM) using a hardware NVMM emulator that allows fine-grain tuning of NVMM performance parameters. Our evaluation results show that NVMM improves storage application performance significantly over flash-based SSDs and HDDs. We also compare the performance of applications running on realistic NVMM with the performance of the same applications running on idealized NVMM with the same performance as DRAM. We find that although NVMM is projected to have higher latency and lower bandwidth than DRAM, these difference have only a modest impact on application performance. A much larger drag on NVMM performance is the cost of ensuring data resides safely in the NVMM (rather than the volatile caches) so that applications can make strong guarantees about persistence and consistency. In response, we propose an optimized approach to flushing data from CPU caches that minimizes this cost. Our evaluation shows that this technique significantly improves performance for applications that require strict durability and consistency guarantees over large regions of memory.