Journal of Xidian University

Previous Articles     Next Articles

Memory-extended architecture based on the SSD and DRAM

WANG Liyu;CHEN Lan;HAO Xiaoran;WANG Qiang;NI Mao   

  1. (EDA Center, Institute of Microelectronics, Univ. of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China)
  • Received:2016-05-26 Online:2017-06-20 Published:2017-07-17

Abstract:

The data-intensive applications of Big Data era are eager to boost system performance through large capacity of memory. However, the use of the large DRAM is restricted by its high power consumption and price per bit. Flash as an existing technology of Non-Volatile Memory, it has some advantages of large capacity, low price and low power consumption. Therefore, we propose an extended memory architecture which expands the RAM with the SSD. The large extended memory is managed at an application object granularity to boost the efficiency of accessing data on the SSD. To reduce the waste of physical memory because of the object granularity, it provides a flexible memory partition and multi-mapping strategy to manage the physical memory by micro-pages. We implement a runtime library to provide several interfaces for applications to access the large memory transparently. Experimental results with several data-intensive workloads show that this method can provide up to 3.3 times performance improvement over the one that uses the SSD as the system swap device which works at the page level.

Key words: big data, data-intensive application, non-volatile memory, solid state disk, memory extension