Efficient Support of Position Independence on Non-Volatile Memory Guoyang Chen Lei Zhang Richa Budhiraja Qualcomm Inc. North Carolina State University Qualcomm Inc.
[email protected] Raleigh, NC
[email protected] [email protected] Xipeng Shen Youfeng Wu North Carolina State University Intel Corp. Raleigh, NC
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT In Proceedings of MICRO-50, Cambridge, MA, USA, October 14–18, 2017, This paper explores solutions for enabling efficient supports of 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3123939.3124543 position independence of pointer-based data structures on byte- addressable None-Volatile Memory (NVM). When a dynamic data structure (e.g., a linked list) gets loaded from persistent storage into 1 INTRODUCTION main memory in different executions, the locations of the elements Byte-Addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) is a new class contained in the data structure could differ in the address spaces of memory technologies, including phase-change memory (PCM), from one run to another. As a result, some special support must memristors, STT-MRAM, resistive RAM (ReRAM), and even flash- be provided to ensure that the pointers contained in the data struc- backed DRAM (NV-DIMMs). Unlike on DRAM, data on NVM tures always point to the correct locations, which is called position are durable, despite software crashes or power loss. Compared to independence. existing flash storage, some of these NVM technologies promise This paper shows the insufficiency of traditional methods in sup- 10-100x better performance, and can be accessed via memory in- porting position independence on NVM. It proposes a concept called structions rather than I/O operations.