Paper Info
Title
On using network RAM as a non-volatile buffer
Abstract
File systems and databases usually make several synchronous disk write accesses in order to make sure that the disk always has a consistent view of their data, so that it can be recovered in the case of a system crash. Since synchronous disk operations are slow, some systems choose to employ asynchronous disk write operations that improve performance at the cost of low reliability: in case of a system crash all data that have not yet been written to disk are lost. In this paper we describe a software-based Non-Volatile RAM system that achieves the high performance of asynchronous write operations without sacrificing the reliability of synchronous write operations. Our system takes a set of volatile main memories residing in independent workstations and transforms it into a non-volatile memory buffer – much like RAIDS do with magnetic disks. It then uses this non-volatile buffer as an intermediate storage space in order to acknowledge synchronous write operations before actually writing the data to magnetic disk, but after writing the data to (intermediate) stable storage. We demonstrate the performance advantages of our system using both simulation and experimental evaluation.
Year
DOI
Venue
1999
10.1023/A:1019003514550
Cluster Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
low reliability,software-based non-volatile ram system,non-volatile buffer,synchronous disk operation,system crash,performance advantage,network ram,high performance,synchronous disk,asynchronous disk,intermediate storage space,magnetic disk
Asynchronous communication,Disk buffer,Write once read many,Computer science,Workstation,Real-time computing,Write buffer,Write combining,Memory buffer register,Operating system,Stable storage
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2
4
1573-7543
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.58
20
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dionisios N. Pnevmatikatos1982106.40
Evangelos P. Markatos21821151.96
Grigorios Magklis370245.64
Sotiris Ioannidis41383130.64