Design and Implementation of a Log-structured Buffer Based on Non-volatile Memory

Yongseok Son

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2018.45.11.1117

Next-generation non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, such as PCM and STTMRAM, provide low latency, high bandwidth, non-volatility, and high capacity. Such NVMs are widely used and studied in the field of computer systems and databases for high performance computing. For example, recent researchers have used NVM for journaling buffers and database logging of file systems and have conducted many optimization studies accordingly. As a complement to existing work, this paper focuses on the atomic page update of applications. For example, in a data management application such as a database system, the atomicity of the pages is ensured by performing a redundant write operation with a temporary buffer in order to atomically update multiple pages. However, this redundant write operation can reduce the performance. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a log-structured buffer manager (LSMB) to improve the performance while ensuring the consistency. LSBM updates the page to NVM by logging and provides buffering. In addition, if there are duplicated pages in the buffer, the old version of the page is removed to reflect only the latest page, which minimizes the I/O and write amount. Experimental results show that LSBM improves the performance of the application and reduces the total write amount.