1 research outputs found
Architecture-Aware, High Performance Transaction for Persistent Memory
Byte-addressable non-volatile main memory (NVM) demands transactional
mechanisms to access and manipulate data on NVM atomically. Those transaction
mechanisms often employ a logging mechanism (undo logging or redo logging).
However, the logging mechanisms can bring large runtime overhead (8%-49% in our
evaluation), and 41%-78% of the overhead attributes to the frequent cache-line
flushing. Such large overhead significantly diminishes the performance benefits
offered by NVM. In this paper, we introduce a new method to reduce the overhead
of cache-line flushing for logging-based transactions. Different from the
traditional method that works at the program level and leverages program
semantics to reduce the logging overhead, we introduce architecture awareness.
In particular, we do not flush certain cache blocks, as long as they are
estimated to be eliminated out of the cache because of the hardware caching
mechanism (e.g., the cache replacement algorithm). Furthermore, we coalesce
those cache blocks with low dirtiness to improve the efficiency of cache-line
flushing. We implement an architecture-aware, high performance transaction
runtime system for persistent memory, Archapt. Our results show that comparing
with an undo logging (PMDK) and a redo logging (Mnemosyne), Archapt reduces
cache-line flushing by 66% and improves system throughput by 19% on average
(42% at most). Our crash tests with four hardware caching policies show that
Archapt provides a strong guarantee on crash consistency