Boosting NVDIMM Performance with a Lightweight Caching Algorithm

In the big data era, data-intensive applications have growing demand for the capacity of DRAM main memory, but the frequent DRAM refresh, high leakage power, and high unit cost bring serious design issues on scaling up DRAM capacity. To address this issue, a nonvolatile dual inline memory module (NVDIMM), which is a hybrid memory module, becomes a possible alternative to replace the DRAM as main memory in some data-intensive applications. The NVDIMM that consists of a small-sized high-speed DRAM and a large-sized low-cost nonvolatile memory (i.e., flash memory) has the serious performance issue on accessing data stored in the flash memory because of the huge performance gap between the DRAM and the flash memory. However, there is limited room to adopt a complex caching algorithm for using the DRAM as the cache of flash memory in the NVDIMM main memory, because a complex caching algorithm itself would already cause too much performance degradation on handling each request to access the NVDIMM main memory. In this paper, we present a lightweight caching algorithm to boost NVDIMM performance by minimizing the cache management overhead and reducing the frequencies to access flash memory. A series of experiments was conducted based on popular benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the performance of the NVDIMM main memory.