A Cache Management Strategy to Replace Wear Leveling Techniques for Embedded Flash Memory

Prices of NAND flash memories are falling drastically due to market growth and fabrication process mastering while research efforts from a technological point of view in terms of endurance and density are very active. NAND flash memories are becoming the most important storage media in mobile computing and tend to be less confined to this area. The major constraint of such a technology is the limited number of possible erase operations per block which tend to quickly provoke memory wear out. To cope with this issue, state-of-the-art solutions implement wear leveling policies to level the wear out of the memory and so increase its lifetime. These policies are integrated into the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) and greatly contribute in decreasing the write performance. In this paper, we propose to reduce the flash memory wear out problem and improve its performance by absorbing the erase operations throughout a dual cache system replacing FTL wear leveling and garbage collection services. We justify this idea by proposing a first performance evaluation of an exclusively cache based system for embedded flash memories. Unlike wear leveling schemes, the proposed cache solution reduces the total number of erase operations reported on the media by absorbing them in the cache for workloads expressing a minimal global sequential rate.Comment: Ce papier a obtenu le "Best Paper Award" dans le "Computer System track" nombre de page: 8; International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer & Telecommunication Systems, La Haye : Netherlands (2011

On using micro-clouds to deliver the fog

The cloud is scalable and cost-efficient, but it is not ideal for hosting all applications. Fog computing proposes an alternative of offloading some computation to the edge. Which applications to offload, where to, and when is not entirely clear yet due to our lack of understanding of potential edge infrastructures. Through a number of experiments, we showcase the feasibility and readiness of micro-clouds formed by collections of Raspberry Pis to host a range of fog applications, particularly for network-constrained environments

SSD: New Challenges for Digital Forensics

ICT changes continuously and we are used to look at IT in a slightly dif-ferent way every year. Things are developed and manufactured to be smaller and faster but few changes are truly technologically revolutionary. Some changes creep up on us as they arrive under cover of previously known technology. Solid State Disks (SSD) is such a technology. The use of SSD is simple enough and for many purposes it can be used as if it was a normal hard disc but many times faster and with a very much lower power consumption. But, SSD is not an evolution of hard disc technology, it is a completely new technology which imitates the behav-iour of a hard disc. There are major underpinning differences which have serious consequences for security and for digital forensic. Due to how the SSDs work it is not always certain that deleted data are purged from the disc. On the other hand SSD‟s can sometimes purge data all by themselves even if they are not connected to any interface with only the power on. This means that normal guidelines aimed at hard discs for how to preserve digital forensic evidence are not just inappropri-ate but could if followed result in potential evidence being lost, destroyed or deemed unvalid as evidence. This paper gives an overview of some of the princi-pal and unexpected challenges that SSDs have brought with them for Digital Fo-rensics investigations

Revisiting DBMS Space Management for Native Flash

ABSTRACT In this paper we present our work in progress on revisiting traditional DBMS mechanisms to manage space on native Flash and how it is administered by the DBA. Our observations and initial results show that: the standard logical database structures can be used for physical organization of data on native Flash; at the same time higher DBMS performance is achieved without incurring extra DBA overhead. Initial experimental evaluation indicates a 20% increase in transactional throughput under TPC-C, by performing intelligent data placement on Flash, less erase operations and thus better Flash longevity

Improving write performance by enhancing internal parallelism of Solid State Drives

Abstract—Most researches of Solid State Drives (SSDs) archi-tectures rely on Flash Translation Layer (FTL) algorithms and wear-leveling; however, internal parallelism in Solid State Drives has not been well explored. In this research, we proposed a new strategy to improve SSD write performance by enhancing internal parallelism inside SSDs. A SDRAM buffer is added in the design for buffering and scheduling write requests. Because the same logical block numbers may be translated to different physical numbers at different times in FTL, the on-board SDRAM buffer is used to buffer requests at the lower level of FTL. When the buffer is full, same amount of data will be assigned to each storage package in SSDs to enhance internal parallelism. To accurately evaluate performance, we use both synthetic workloads and real-world applications in experiments. We compare the enhanced internal parallelism scheme with the traditional LRU strategy since it is unfair to compare an SSD having buffer with an SSD without a buffer. The simulation results demonstrate that the writing performance of our design is significantly improved compared with the LRU-cache strategy with the same amount of buffer sizes. I

B+-tree Index Optimization by Exploiting Internal Parallelism of Flash-based Solid State Drives

Previous research addressed the potential problems of the hard-disk oriented design of DBMSs of flashSSDs. In this paper, we focus on exploiting potential benefits of flashSSDs. First, we examine the internal parallelism issues of flashSSDs by conducting benchmarks to various flashSSDs. Then, we suggest algorithm-design principles in order to best benefit from the internal parallelism. We present a new I/O request concept, called psync I/O that can exploit the internal parallelism of flashSSDs in a single process. Based on these ideas, we introduce B+-tree optimization methods in order to utilize internal parallelism. By integrating the results of these methods, we present a B+-tree variant, PIO B-tree. We confirmed that each optimization method substantially enhances the index performance. Consequently, PIO B-tree enhanced B+-tree's insert performance by a factor of up to 16.3, while improving point-search performance by a factor of 1.2. The range search of PIO B-tree was up to 5 times faster than that of the B+-tree. Moreover, PIO B-tree outperformed other flash-aware indexes in various synthetic workloads. We also confirmed that PIO B-tree outperforms B+-tree in index traces collected inside the Postgresql DBMS with TPC-C benchmark.Comment: VLDB201

NVSwap Latency-Aware Paging Using Non-Volatile Main Memory

Page relocation (paging) from DRAM to swap devices is an important task of a virtual memory system in operating systems. Existing Linux paging mechanisms have two main deficiencies: (1) they may incur a high I/O latency due to write interference on solid-state disks and aggressive memory page reclaiming rate under high memory pressure and (2) they do not provide predictable latency bound for latency-sensitive applications because they cannot control the allocation of system resources among concurrent processes sharing swap devices. In this thesis, we present the design and implementation of a latency-aware paging mechanism called NVSwap. It supports a hybrid swap space using both regular secondary storage devices (e.g., solid-state disks) and non-volatile main memory (NVMM). The design is more cost-effective than using only NVMM as swap spaces. Furthermore, NVSwap uses NVMM as a persistent paging buffer to serve the page-out requests and hide the latency of paging between the regular swap device and DRAM. It supports in-situ paging for pages in the persistent paging buffer avoiding the slow I/O path. Finally, NVSwap allows users to specify latency bounds for individual processes or a group of related processes and enforces the bounds by dynamically controlling the resource allocation of NVMM and page reclaiming rate in memory among scheduling units. We have implemented a prototype of NVSwap in the Linux kernel-3.16.74. Our results demonstrate that NVSwap reduces paging latency by up to 99% and provides performance guarantee and isolation among concurrent applications sharing swap devices

Stochastic Analysis on RAID Reliability for Solid-State Drives

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been widely deployed in desktops and data centers. However, SSDs suffer from bit errors, and the bit error rate is time dependent since it increases as an SSD wears down. Traditional storage systems mainly use parity-based RAID to provide reliability guarantees by striping redundancy across multiple devices, but the effectiveness of RAID in SSDs remains debatable as parity updates aggravate the wearing and bit error rates of SSDs. In particular, an open problem is that how different parity distributions over multiple devices, such as the even distribution suggested by conventional wisdom, or uneven distributions proposed in recent RAID schemes for SSDs, may influence the reliability of an SSD RAID array. To address this fundamental problem, we propose the first analytical model to quantify the reliability dynamics of an SSD RAID array. Specifically, we develop a "non-homogeneous" continuous time Markov chain model, and derive the transient reliability solution. We validate our model via trace-driven simulations and conduct numerical analysis to provide insights into the reliability dynamics of SSD RAID arrays under different parity distributions and subject to different bit error rates and array configurations. Designers can use our model to decide the appropriate parity distribution based on their reliability requirements.Comment: 12 page

An I/O Scheduling Algorithm for Solid State Disk Based on Request Size

对于同类型的I/O请求,基于闪存固态盘的请求响应时间与请求大小基本呈线性比例关系,并且固态盘的读写性能具有非对称性。针对该特性,提出一种基于请求大小的固态盘I/O调度(SIOS)算法,从I/O请求平均响应时间的角度提高固态盘设备的I/O性能。根据读写性能的非对称性,对读写请求进行分组并且优先处理读请求。在此基础上首先处理等待队列中的小请求,从而减少队列中请求的平均等待时间。采用SlC和MlC 2种类型的固态盘进行实验,在5种测试负载的驱动下与lInuX系统中的3种调度算法进行比较,对于SlC固态盘,SIOS平均响应时间分别减少18.4%、25.8%、14.9%、14.5%和13.1%,而对于MlC固态盘,平均响应时间分别减少16.9%、24.4%、13.1%、13.0%和13.7%,结果表明,SIOS能有效减少I/O请求的平均响应时间,提高固态盘存储系统的I/O性能。The response times are linear with the request sizes for flash-based Solid State Disk(SSD) with the same request type.Moreover, the read performance and write performance of flash-based SSD are asymmetric.Based on these characteristics, this paper proposes a Size-based I/O Scheduler(SIOS) for flash-based SSD to improve the I/O performance of SSD-based storage systems from the viewpoint of average response time.SIOS utilizes the asymmetric read and write performance characteristics of flash-based SSD and gives higher priority to the read requests.Moreover, by first processing the small requests in the I/O waiting queue, the average waiting times of the requests are reduced significantly.It implements SIOS in the Linux kernel and evaluates it with two kinds of SSD devices(SLC and MLC)driven by the five traces.Compared with the existing Linux disk I/O schedulers, evaluation results show that SIOS reduces average response times by 18.4%, 25.8%, 14.9%, 14.5% and 13.1% for SLC-based flash SSD, and reduces average response times by 16.9%, 24.4%, 13.1%, 13.0% and 13.7% for MLC-based flash SSD.Results show that compared with the state-of-the-arts, SIOS reduces the average response times significantly.Consequently, the I/O performance of the SSD-based storage systems is improved.国家自然科学基金青年科学基金资助项目“重复数据删除存储系统的数据重构性能和能效研究”(61100033