CAUSE: Critical application usage-aware memory system using non-volatile memory for mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices are severely limited in memory, which affects critical user-experience metrics such as application service time. Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies such as STT-RAM and PCM are ideal candidates to provide higher memory capacity with negligible energy overhead. However, existing memory management systems overlook mobile users application usage which provides crucial cues for improving user experience. In this paper, we propose CAUSE, a novel memory system based on DRAM-NVM hybrid memory architecture. CAUSE takes explicit account of the application usage patterns to distinguish data criticality and identify suitable swap candidates. We also devise NVM hardware design optimized for the access characteristics of the swapped pages. We evaluate CAUSE on a real Android smartphone and NVSim simulator using user application usage logs. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves 32% faster launch time for mobile applications while reducing energy cost by 90% and 44% on average over non-optimized STT-RAM and PCM, respectively.