Visibility Graph-based Cache Management for DRAM Buffer Inside Solid-state Drives

Abstract

Most solid-state drives (SSDs) adopt an on-board Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) to buffer the write data, which can significantly reduce the amount of write operations committed to the flash array of SSD if data exhibits locality in write operations. This article focuses on efficiently managing the small amount of DRAM cache inside SSDs. The basic idea is to employ the visibility graph technique to unify both temporal and spatial locality of references of I/O accesses, for directing cache management in SSDs. Specifically, we propose to adaptively generate the visibility graph of cached data pages and then support batch adjustment of adjacent or nearby (hot) cached data pages by referring to the connection situations in the visibility graph. In addition, we propose to evict the buffered data pages in batches by also referring to the connection situations, to maximize the internal flushing parallelism of SSD devices without worsening I/O congestion. The trace-driven simulation experiments show that our proposal can yield improvements on cache hits by between 0.8% and 19.8%, and the overall I/O latency by 25.6% on average, compared to state-of-the-art cache management schemes inside SSDs.