Data tiering in heterogeneous memory systems
Subramanya R. Dulloor, Amitabha Roy, Zheguang Zhao, Narayanan Sundaram, Nadathur Satish, Rajesh Sankaran, Jeff Jackson, Karsten Schwan · 2016
Memory-based data center applications require increasingly large memory capacities, but face the challenges posed by the inherent difficulties in scaling DRAM and also the cost of DRAM. Future systems are attempting to address these demands with heterogeneous memory architectures coupling DRAM with high capacity, low cost, but also lower performance, non-volatile memories (NVM) such as PCM and RRAM. A key usage model intended for NVM is as cheaper high capacity volatile memory. Data center operators are bound to ask whether this model for the usage of NVM to replace the majority of DRAM memory leads to a large slowdown in their applications? It is crucial to answer this question because a large performance impact will be an impediment to the adoption of such systems.