Towards software defined persistent memory: rethinking software support for heterogenous memory architectures

Abstract

The emergence of persistent memories promises a sea-change in application and data center architectures, with efficiencies and performance not possible with today's volatile DRAM and persistent slow storage. We present Software Defined Persistent Memory, an approach that enables applications to use persistent memory in a variety of local and remote configurations. The heterogeneity is managed by a middleware that manages hardware specific needs and optimizations. We present the first ever design and implementation of such an architecture, and illustrate the key abstractions that are needed to hide hardware specific details from applications while exposing necessary characteristics for performance optimization. We evaluate the performance of our implementation on a set of microbenchmarks and database workloads using the MySQL database. Through our evaluation, we show that it is possible to apply Software Defined concepts to persistent memory, to improve performance while retaining functionality and optimizing for different hardware architectures.