CAREER: Enhancing Data Center Storage System with Persistent Memory

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Persistent memory technique is envisioned to revolutionize data center storage systems. Its unpredictable performance, energy, and cost benefits can adversely affect productivity, efficiency, and profit in data centers. Though promising, this technical transition can fundamentally change the decades-long memory and storage system design assumptions and introduce critical design challenges. For example, new performance landscape can change the energy efficiency model of data centers and break the existing load balance across various system resources; traditional data reliability schemes can become suboptimal due to the discrepant failure patterns and reliability issues of new memory technologies; current applications and system software may not fully exploit the benefits offered by persistent memory. This research focuses on enhancing the performance, energy-efficiency, and reliability of data center storage system by fully exploiting the potential of persistent memory. The central approach is to rethink data center architecture design strategies and memory/storage stack management, making them persistent memory aware. The project devises fundamental techniques in efficiency modeling, load balancing of critical system resources, and low-cost reliability guarantee across single server memory/storage stack and distributed storage systems. The project also enhances a set of key data center applications by leveraging persistent memory. It is expected that research ideas developed in this project will enable significantly improved access performance, energy efficiency, reliability, and lifetime in data center memory and storage systems, taking a large step in making our daily lives more productive.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.