DRAMPersist: Making DRAM Systems Persistent

Abstract

Modern applications exercise main memory systems in different ways. A lot of scale-out, in-memory applications exploit a number of desirable properties provided by DRAM such as high capacity, low latency and high bandwidth. Although DRAM technology continues to scale aggressively, new resistive memory technologies are on the horizon, promising scalability, density and non-volatility. However, they still suffer from longer, asymmetric read-write latencies and have lower endurance as compared to DRAM. Considering these factors, scale-out, distributed applications will benefit greatly from main memory architectures that provide the non-volatility of new memory technologies, but still have DRAM-like latencies. To that end, we introduce DRAMPersist -- a novel mechanism to make main memory persistent and complement existing high speed storage, specifically geared for scale-out systems.