Migration based page caching algorithm for a hybrid main memory of DRAM and PRAM

Abstract

As the DRAM based main memory significantly increases the power and cost budget of a computer system, new memory technologies such as Phase-change RAM (PRAM), Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM), and Magnetic RAM (MRAM) have been proposed to replace the DRAM. Among these memories, PRAM is the most promising candidate for large scale main memory because of its high density and low power consumption. In previous researches, a hybrid main memory approach of DRAM and PRAM is adopted to make up for the latency and endurance limits of PRAM. On the other hand, large amount of a main memory is used for page cache to hide disk access latency. Many page caching algorithms such as LRU, LIRS, and CLOCK-Pro are developed and show good performance, but these are only consider the main memory with uniform access latency and unlimited endurance. They cannot be directly adapted to the hybrid main memory architecture with PRAM.