A File System Bypassing Volatile Main Memory: Towards A Single-Level Persistent Store
TITLE:
A File System Bypassing Volatile Main Memory: Towards A Single-Level Persistent Store
DATE:
Friday, September 7th, 2018
TIME:
3:30 PM
LOCATION:
GMCS-314
SPEAKER:
Tao Xie, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science, San Diego State University.
ABSTRACT:
Existing persistent memory (PM) based file systems rely on a DRAM and PM hybrid store.
Although a hybrid store does boost system performance while avoiding some current PM
limitations like limited endurance, we envision that with more advances PM technologies
could provide applications with a single-level persistent store in the not-so-distant future.
As a first step to explore this direction, in this paper we design, implement, and evaluate
a new persistent memory file system called SPFS (Single-level Persistent File System), which
completely bypasses conventional DRAM-based volatile main memory.
Unlike all existing PM-based file systems, SPFS never leverages DRAM to manage its metadata.
Thus, redundant copies of metadata in volatile main memory and data movements between the
two memories can be totally eliminated. The goal of this paper is to explore how to manage
files and their metadata with guaranteed data consistency on PM without the support of DRAM,
which makes a first step towards the ultimate success of a single-level persistent store.
Experimental results demonstrate that SPFS outperforms traditional DRAM-based in-memory file
systems ramfs and tmpfs in most cases. Besides, its performance is only moderately worse than
that of NOVA, a state-of-the-art PM-based file system.
HOST:
Dr. Wei Wang
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