Energy Aware Persistence
Sudarsun Kannan, Moinuddin K. Qureshi, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan · 2016
Next generation byte addressable nonvolatile memories (NVMs) such as PCM, Memristor, and 3D X-Point are attractive solutions for mobile and other end-user devices, as they offer memory scalability as well as fast persistent storage. However, NVM's limitations of slow writes and high write energy are magnified for applications that require atomic, consistent, isolated and durable (ACID) persistence. For maintaining ACID persistence guarantees, applications not only need to do extra writes to NVM but also need to execute a significant number of additional CPU instructions for performing NVM writes in a transactional manner. Our analysis shows that maintaining persistence with ACID guarantees increases CPU energy up to 7.3x and NVM energy up to 5.1x compared to a baseline with no ACID guarantees. For computing platforms such as mobile devices, where energy consumption is a critical factor, it is important that the energy cost of persistence is reduced.