Kan Wu, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin—Madison
New non-volatile memory technologies offer unprecedented performance levels for persistent storage. However, to exploit their full potential, a deeper performance characterization of such devices is required. In this paper, we analyze a NVM-based block device -- the Intel Optane SSD -- and formalize an "unwritten contract'' of the Optane SSD. We show that violating this contract can result in 11x worse read latency and limited throughput (only 20% of peak bandwidth) regardless of parallelism. We present that this contract is relevant to features of 3D XPoint memory and Intel Optane SSD's controller/interconnect design. Finally, we discuss the implications of the contract.
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author = {Kan Wu and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau},
title = {Towards an Unwritten Contract of Intel Optane {SSD}},
booktitle = {11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage 19)},
year = {2019},
address = {Renton, WA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotstorage19/presentation/wu-kan},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}
