Persistent Memory Workload Characterization: A Hardware Perspective*

Abstract

Persistent memory is a new tier of memory that functions as a hybrid of traditional storage systems and main memory. It combines the advantages of both: the data persistence property of storage with the byte-addressability and fast load/store interface of memory. As such, persistent memory provides direct data access without the performance and energy overhead of secondary storage access. Being at early stages of development, most previous persistent memory system designs are motivated and evaluated by software-based performance profiling and characterization. Yet by attaching on the processor-memory bus, persistent memory is managed by both system software and hardware control units in processors and memory devices. Therefore, understanding the hardware behavior is critical to unlocking the full potential of persistent memory. In this paper, we explore the performance interaction across applications, persistent memory system software, and hardware components, such as caching, address translation, buffering, and control logic in processors and memory systems. Based on our characterization results, we provide a set of implications and recommendations that can be used to optimize persistent memory system software and hardware designs.