Survive: Pointer-Based In-DRAM Incremental Checkpointing for Low-Cost Data Persistence and Rollback-Recovery

Abstract

This paper introduces the Survive DRAM architecture for effective in-memory micro-checkpointing. Survive implements low-cost incremental checkpointing, enabling fast rollback that can be used in various architectural techniques such as speculation, approximation, or low voltage operation. Survive also provides crash consistency when used as the frontend of a hybrid DRAM-NVM memory system. This is accomplished by carefully copying the incremental checkpoints generated in the DRAM frontend to the NVM backend. Simulations show that Survive only imposes an average 3.5 percent execution time overhead over an unmodified DRAM main-memory system with no checkpointing, while reducing the number of NVM writes by 89 percent over an NVM-only main-memory system.