Tree-based Read-only Data Chunks for NVRAM Programming

Abstract

As the DRAM technology is fast reaching a scaling threshold, emerging non-volatile, byte-addressable memory (NVRAM) is expected to supplement and eventually replace DRAM. Future computing systems are anticipated to have a large amount of NVRAM, possibly spanning across more than one coherence domain. Furthermore, taking advantage of in-place persistence provided by the NVRAM in future systems requires a strategy to prevent tolerated failures (e.g. power failure) from leaving persistent data in an incoherent state. A fresh look at memory management approaches across the system stack is required to fully utilize future NVRAM. In this paper, we carefully assess the NVRAM-related memory access and management challenges, its implication to application level programming, and examine the suitability of tree-based read-only data chunks to NVRAM programming.