Understanding and Optimizing Flash-based Key-value Systems in Data Centers

Flash-based key-value systems are widely deployed in today’s data centers for providing high-speed data processing services. These systems deploy flash-friendly data structures, such as slab and Log Structured Merge(LSM) tree, on flash-based Solid State Drives(SSDs) and provide efficient solutions in caching and storage scenarios. With the rapid evolution of data centers, there appear plenty of challenges and opportunities for future optimizations. In this dissertation, we focus on understanding and optimizing flash-based key-value systems from the perspective of workloads, software, and hardware as data centers evolve. We first propose an on-line compression scheme, called SlimCache, considering the unique characteristics of key-value workloads, to virtually enlarge the cache space, increase the hit ratio, and improve the cache performance. Furthermore, to appropriately configure increasingly complex modern key-value data systems, which can have more than 50 parameters with additional hardware and system settings, we quantitatively study and compare five multi-objective optimization methods for auto-tuning the performance of an LSM-tree based key-value store in terms of throughput, the 99th percentile tail latency, convergence time, real-time system throughput, and the iteration process, etc. Last but not least, we conduct an in-depth, comprehensive measurement work on flash-optimized key-value stores with recently emerging 3D XPoint SSDs. We reveal several unexpected bottlenecks in the current key-value store design and present three exemplary case studies to showcase the efficacy of removing these bottlenecks with simple methods on 3D XPoint SSDs. Our experimental results show that our proposed solutions significantly outperform traditional methods. Our study also contributes to providing system implications for auto-tuning the key-value system on flash-based SSDs and optimizing it on revolutionary 3D XPoint based SSDs

WLFC: Write Less in Flash-based Cache

Flash-based disk caches, for example Bcache and Flashcache, has gained tremendous popularity in industry in the last decade because of its low energy consumption, non-volatile nature and high I/O speed. But these cache systems have a worse write performance than the read performance because of the asymmetric I/O costs and the the internal GC mechanism. In addition to the performance issues, since the NAND flash is a type of EEPROM device, the lifespan is also limited by the Program/Erase (P/E) cycles. So how to improve the performance and the lifespan of flash-based caches in write-intensive scenarios has always been a hot issue. Benefiting from Open-Channel SSDs (OCSSDs), we propose a write-friendly flash-based disk cache system, which is called WLFC (Write Less in the Flash-based Cache). In WLFC, a strictly sequential writing method is used to minimize the write amplification. A new replacement algorithm for the write buffer is designed to minimize the erase count caused by the evicting. And a new data layout strategy is designed to minimize the metadata size persisted in SSDs. As a result, the Over-Provisioned (OP) space is completely removed, the erase count of the flash is greatly reduced, and the metadata size is 1/10 or less than that in BCache. Even with a small amount of metadata, the data consistency after the crash is still guaranteed. Compared with the existing mechanism, WLFC brings a 7%-80% reduction in write latency, a 1.07*-4.5* increment in write throughput, and a 50%-88.9% reduction in erase count, with a moderate overhead in read performance

데이터 집약적 응용의 효율적인 시스템 자원 활용을 위한 메모리 서브시스템 최적화

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2020. 8. 염헌영.With explosive data growth, data-intensive applications, such as relational database and key-value storage, have been increasingly popular in a variety of domains in recent years. To meet the growing performance demands of data-intensive applications, it is crucial to efficiently and fully utilize memory resources for the best possible performance. However, general-purpose operating systems (OSs) are designed to provide system resources to applications running on a system in a fair manner at system-level. A single application may find it difficult to fully exploit the systems best performance due to this system-level fairness. For performance reasons, many data-intensive applications implement their own mechanisms that OSs already provide, under the assumption that they know better about the data than OSs. They can be greedily optimized for performance but this may result in inefficient use of system resources. In this dissertation, we claim that simple OS support with minor application modifications can yield even higher application performance without sacrificing system-level resource utilization. We optimize and extend OS memory subsystem for better supporting applications while addressing three memory-related issues in data-intensive applications. First, we introduce a memory-efficient cooperative caching approach between application and kernel buffer to address double caching problem where the same data resides in multiple layers. Second, we present a memory-efficient, transparent zero-copy read I/O scheme to avoid the performance interference problem caused by memory copy behavior during I/O. Third, we propose a memory-efficient fork-based checkpointing mechanism for in-memory database systems to mitigate the memory footprint problem of the existing fork-based checkpointing scheme; memory usage increases incrementally (up to 2x) during checkpointing for update-intensive workloads. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we implement and evaluate our schemes on real multi-core systems. The experimental results demonstrate that our cooperative approach can more effectively address the above issues related to data-intensive applications than existing non-cooperative approaches while delivering better performance (in terms of transaction processing speed, I/O throughput, or memory footprint).최근 폭발적인 데이터 성장과 더불어 데이터베이스, 키-밸류 스토리지 등의 데이터 집약적인 응용들이 다양한 도메인에서 인기를 얻고 있다. 데이터 집약적인 응용의 높은 성능 요구를 충족하기 위해서는 주어진 메모리 자원을 효율적이고 완벽하게 활용하는 것이 중요하다. 그러나, 범용 운영체제(OS)는 시스템에서 수행 중인 모든 응용들에 대해 시스템 차원에서 공평하게 자원을 제공하는 것을 우선하도록 설계되어있다. 즉, 시스템 차원의 공평성 유지를 위한 운영체제 지원의 한계로 인해 단일 응용은 시스템의 최고 성능을 완전히 활용하기 어렵다. 이러한 이유로, 많은 데이터 집약적 응용은 운영체제에서 제공하는 기능에 의지하지 않고 비슷한 기능을 응용 레벨에 구현하곤 한다. 이러한 접근 방법은 탐욕적인 최적화가 가능하다는 점에서 성능 상 이득이 있을 수 있지만, 시스템 자원의 비효율적인 사용을 초래할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 운영체제의 지원과 약간의 응용 수정만으로도 비효율적인 시스템 자원 사용 없이 보다 높은 응용 성능을 보일 수 있음을 증명하고자 한다. 그러기 위해 운영체제의 메모리 서브시스템을 최적화 및 확장하여 데이터 집약적인 응용에서 발생하는 세 가지 메모리 관련 문제를 해결하였다. 첫째, 동일한 데이터가 여러 계층에 존재하는 중복 캐싱 문제를 해결하기 위해 응용과 커널 버퍼 간에 메모리 효율적인 협력 캐싱 방식을 제시하였다. 둘째, 입출력시 발생하는 메모리 복사로 인한 성능 간섭 문제를 피하기 위해 메모리 효율적인 무복사 읽기 입출력 방식을 제시하였다. 셋째, 인-메모리 데이터베이스 시스템을 위한 메모리 효율적인 fork 기반 체크포인트 기법을 제안하여 기존 포크 기반 체크포인트 기법에서 발생하는 메모리 사용량 증가 문제를 완화하였다; 기존 방식은 업데이트 집약적 워크로드에 대해 체크포인팅을 수행하는 동안 메모리 사용량이 최대 2배까지 점진적으로 증가할 수 있었다. 본 논문에서는 제안한 방법들의 효과를 증명하기 위해 실제 멀티 코어 시스템에 구현하고 그 성능을 평가하였다. 실험결과를 통해 제안한 협력적 접근방식이 기존의 비협력적 접근방식보다 데이터 집약적 응용에게 효율적인 메모리 자원 활용을 가능하게 함으로써 더 높은 성능을 제공할 수 있음을 확인할 수 있었다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.1.1 Importance of Memory Resources 1 1.1.2 Problems 2 1.2 Contributions 5 1.3 Outline 6 Chapter 2 Background 7 2.1 Linux Kernel Memory Management 7 2.1.1 Page Cache 7 2.1.2 Page Reclamation 8 2.1.3 Page Table and TLB Shootdown 9 2.1.4 Copy-on-Write 10 2.2 Linux Support for Applications 11 2.2.1 fork 11 2.2.2 madvise 11 2.2.3 Direct I/O 12 2.2.4 mmap 13 Chapter 3 Memory Efficient Cooperative Caching 14 3.1 Motivation 14 3.1.1 Problems of Existing Datastore Architecture 14 3.1.2 Proposed Architecture 17 3.2 Related Work 17 3.3 Design and Implementation 19 3.3.1 Overview 19 3.3.2 Kernel Support 24 3.3.3 Migration to DBIO 25 3.4 Evaluation 27 3.4.1 System Configuration 27 3.4.2 Methodology 28 3.4.3 TPC-C Benchmarks 30 3.4.4 YCSB Benchmarks 32 3.5 Summary 37 Chapter 4 Memory Efficient Zero-copy I/O 38 4.1 Motivation 38 4.1.1 The Problems of Copy-Based I/O 38 4.2 Related Work 40 4.2.1 Zero Copy I/O 40 4.2.2 TLB Shootdown 42 4.2.3 Copy-on-Write 43 4.3 Design and Implementation 44 4.3.1 Prerequisites for z-READ 44 4.3.2 Overview of z-READ 45 4.3.3 TLB Shootdown Optimization 48 4.3.4 Copy-on-Write Optimization 52 4.3.5 Implementation 55 4.4 Evaluation 55 4.4.1 System Configurations 56 4.4.2 Effectiveness of the TLB Shootdown Optimization 57 4.4.3 Effectiveness of CoW Optimization 59 4.4.4 Analysis of the Performance Improvement 62 4.4.5 Performance Interference Intensity 63 4.4.6 Effectiveness of z-READ in Macrobenchmarks 65 4.5 Summary 67 Chapter 5 Memory Efficient Fork-based Checkpointing 69 5.1 Motivation 69 5.1.1 Fork-based Checkpointing 69 5.1.2 Approach 71 5.2 Related Work 73 5.3 Design and Implementation 74 5.3.1 Overview 74 5.3.2 OS Support 78 5.3.3 Implementation 79 5.4 Evaluation 80 5.4.1 Experimental Setup 80 5.4.2 Performance 81 5.5 Summary 86 Chapter 6 Conclusion 87 요약 100Docto

Overview of Caching Mechanisms to Improve Hadoop Performance

Nowadays distributed computing environments, large amounts of data are generated from different resources with a high velocity, rendering the data difficult to capture, manage, and process within existing relational databases. Hadoop is a tool to store and process large datasets in a parallel manner across a cluster of machines in a distributed environment. Hadoop brings many benefits like flexibility, scalability, and high fault tolerance; however, it faces some challenges in terms of data access time, I/O operation, and duplicate computations resulting in extra overhead, resource wastage, and poor performance. Many researchers have utilized caching mechanisms to tackle these challenges. For example, they have presented approaches to improve data access time, enhance data locality rate, remove repetitive calculations, reduce the number of I/O operations, decrease the job execution time, and increase resource efficiency. In the current study, we provide a comprehensive overview of caching strategies to improve Hadoop performance. Additionally, a novel classification is introduced based on cache utilization. Using this classification, we analyze the impact on Hadoop performance and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each group. Finally, a novel hybrid approach called Hybrid Intelligent Cache (HIC) that combines the benefits of two methods from different groups, H-SVM-LRU and CLQLMRS, is presented. Experimental results show that our hybrid method achieves an average improvement of 31.2% in job execution time

FlashX: Massive Data Analysis Using Fast I/O

With the explosion of data and the increasing complexity of data analysis, large-scale data analysis imposes significant challenges in systems design. While current research focuses on scaling out to large clusters, these scale-out solutions introduce a significant amount of overhead. This thesis is motivated by the advance of new I/O technologies such as flash memory. Instead of scaling out, we explore efficient system designs in a single commodity machine with non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) and scale to large datasets by utilizing commodity solid-state drives (SSDs). This thesis explores the impact of the new I/O technologies on large-scale data analysis. Instead of implementing individual data analysis algorithms for SSDs, we develop a data analysis ecosystem called FlashX to target a large range of data analysis tasks. FlashX includes three subsystems: SAFS, FlashGraph and FlashMatrix. SAFS is a user-space filesystem optimized for a large SSD array to deliver maximal I/O throughput from SSDs. FlashGraph is a general-purpose graph analysis framework that processes graphs in a semi-external memory fashion, i.e., keeping vertex state in memory and edges on SSDs, and scales to graphs with billions of vertices by utilizing SSDs through SAFS. FlashMatrix is a matrix-oriented programming framework that supports both sparse matrices and dense matrices for general data analysis. Similar to FlashGraph, it scales matrix operations beyond memory capacity by utilizing SSDs. We demonstrate that with the current I/O technologies FlashGraph and FlashMatrix in the (semi-)external-memory meets or even exceeds state-of-the-art in-memory data analysis frameworks while scaling to massive datasets for a large variety of data analysis tasks