An Empirical Evaluation of NVM-aware File Systems on Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules

Abstract

Cloud computing arouses the need for large-scale data processing which in turn promises vigorous developments on distributed file systems. The performance of the underlying storage nodes determines the performance of the overall system. Emerging byte-addressable Non-volatile memories (NVM) are promising techniques that can greatly improve storage performance. Researchers have already investigated NVM or NVMaware file systems to take advantage of the characteristics of NVM. However, previous researchers usually perform the studies based on simulations or emulations. In this paper, we provide an empirical evaluation of NVM-aware file systems on the first commercially available byte-addressable NVM (i.e., the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module (DCPMM)) We first evaluate the performance of Ext4, XFS, F2FS, Ext4-DAX, XFSDAX, and NOVA file systems on DCPMM, Optane SSD, and NVMe SSD. Then we compare them in terms of throughput and different access patterns. Second, we observe how remote NUMA node access and device mapper striping affect the performance of DCPMM. We anticipate that the experimental results and performance analysis will provide the implications on various memory and storage systems.