ArchTM: Architecture-Aware, High Performance Transaction for Persistent Memory

Failure-atomic transactions are a critical mechanism for accessing and manipulating data on persistent memory (PM) with crash consistency. We identify that small random writes in metadata modifications and locality-oblivious memory allocation in traditional PM transaction systems mismatch PM architecture. We present ArchTM, a PM transaction system based on two design principles: avoiding small writes and encouraging sequential writes. ArchTM is a variant of copy-on-write (CoW) system to reduce write traffic to PM. Unlike conventional CoW schemes, ArchTM reduces metadata modifications through a scalable lookup table on DRAM. ArchTM introduces an annotation mechanism to ensure crash consistency and a locality-aware data path in memory allocation to increases coalesable writes inside PM devices. We evaluate ArchTM against four state-of-the-art transaction systems (one in PMDK, Romulus, DudeTM, and one from Oracle. ArchTM outperforms the competitor systems by 58x, 5x, 3x and 7x on average, using micro-benchmarks and real-world workloads on real PM.