A Framework for Emulating Non-Volatile Memory Systemswith Different Performance Characteristics

Abstract

Exponential increase of online data and a corresponding growth of data-centric applications (Big Data analytics) forces system architects to revisit assumptions and requirements of the future system design. New non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, such as Phase-Change Memory (PCM) and HP Memristor offer significantly improved latency and power efficiency compared to flash and hard drives. Many future systems are expected to have both DRAM and NVM. This can radically change system and software design, and enable new style of Big Data processing applications. However, the commercial unavailability of new NVMs technologies and uncertainty of their performance characteristics make it difficult to assess new system software stacks and to study their performance impact on future workloads. To bridge this gap and encourage an early design phase, we are building a DRAM-based performance emulation platform, called NVMpro, that leverages features available in commodity hardware, to emulate different latency and bandwidth characteristics of future NVM technologies. NVMpro enables an efficient and accurate emulation of a wide range of NVM latencies and bandwidth characteristics for performance evaluation of emerging byte-addressable NVMs and their impact on applications performance without modifying or instrumenting their source code.