MQSim-E: Design and Implementation of an NVMe SSD Simulator for Enterprise SSDs

Duwon Hong, Dusol Lee, Jihong Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2022.49.4.271

In the study of storage systems such as SSD, a simulator that accurately mimic the operation of SW/HW inside the system plays an important role. In this paper, MQSim, which is widely used in research on NVMe SSDs, was shown to be inappropriate for the development of enterprise-SSD, and we propose an MQSim-E simulator that supports optimized techniques adopted in enterprise-SSD. MQSim-E fully utilizes the parallelism of flash memory and minimizes the performance overhead of garbage collection, improving IOPS, which is an important design goal for enterprise-SSDs, by up to 210% and reducing tail latency by up to 16,000% compared to the existing simulator (MQSim) to accurately reflect the characteristics of commercial enterprise SSDs.