CRII: CSR: System Techniques to Exploit the Byte-Accessibility of Solid-State Drives

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Flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) has been the backbone of modern storage systems to support a growing number of data-intensive applications such as graph analytics and databases. For decades, systems software and applications used a generic block interface to access data in SSDs. Today it is feasible to access SSDs in both byte and block granularity through memory mapped input/output interfaces. However, it is still unclear how byte-addressable SSDs will be integrated in today's memory-storage hierarchy, how will they affect the design and implementation of systems software such as file systems, and how applications will benefit from the byte-accessible property of SSDs.This project proposes to investigate the systems techniques to support and exploit the byte-accessibility of SSDs in modern memory-storage hierarchy. First, the project proposes to rethink the unified memory-storage hierarchy and efficiently use byte-addressable SSD as part of the main memory to ease the management and programmability of the dual byte and block-accessible interfaces. Second, the project proposes adaptive page migration mechanisms to enable applications to gain benefits from both byte-addressable, large-scale SSD and fast dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) concurrently and transparently. Third, the project proposes a new abstraction of fine-grained data persistence which will rethink the design and implementation of data persistency mechanisms and further reduce the associated performance overhead and redundant writes to storage devices. As SSDs have been widely deployed in various computing platforms, the proposed research activities will benefit many fields of study with high-performance persistent storage requirements including scientific computing, big data analytics, and financial services. The project will also carve a path for technology transition to practice through industrial collaborations, as well as facilitate research activities for undergraduate and underrepresented students. This project will integrate the research developments and results into a new course that centers around memory and storage technologies. The resulting software, dataset, publications, and course materials will be released through an open-source repository on GitHub: https://github.com/sprlab/uniflash and maintained for at least five years beyond the completion of this project.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.